Posted by LecroJS 13 hours ago
Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?
I have heard good things about Apple TV as a better alternative to most smart TV native apps. Would some TV’s pair better with this than others for privacy? I don’t want the TV doing anything other than being the display for Apple TV.
I am curious what success others have had.
For the Kodi box get series-7 Intel NUC with Kabylake-era processors, gen 7. They don't run Windows 11, so come very cheap second hand, but decode h264 and hevc in hardware and drive a 4K screen like charm. You can install a modern Wifi card in the NUC and a PCIe SSD.
Then buy one of these: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/154/intel-nuc-hdmi-cec-adapter and put it in your NUC, so you can use the TV remote to control Kodi.
That's it.
Bonus, you can take your TV with you when travelling.
- Root it [0].
- Install Glasshouse [1] and disable all telemetry. YOU now own the glass. Now you can chromecast to the TV, use Adfree YouTube, access IP TV, etc etc etc. No point crippling your TV by pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty.
- Install a bunch of cool apps to your TV [2] (there are many more out there besides those listed here)
- Restore to Factory Defaults if you ever want / need to unroot and get back to stock e.g. a warranty claim
The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again.
BTW, you might have heard of Dev Mode on these TVs but they don't allow anywhere near the functionality that rooting provides.
[0] https://tv.slada.sk/guides/rooting-guide
make sure it’s a model where the latest firmware is rootable and never connect it to your WiFi until you have root
Everything you need to do to get root can be done with an Ethernet connected directly to the TV and your laptop. There may be modifications needed to the root toolkits but with good prompting, agentic Llm can figure it out.
If you bought one without root… you may have a chance never connecting it.
If it’s one on your WiFi that doesn’t have a root exploit the only safe thing to do is change your WiFi password.
If you don’t own your TV assume it’s pwnd.
I assume the TVs Google backdoors are even worse (video scraping, etc, etc) since they are not power constrained.
The root is transient, and Samsung TVs also have Knox security which I presume you really don’t want to trip. Some parts of the file system are protected by SMACK which even root can’t access.
I’m working on reverse engineering the applications that run in that SMACK context to see if there’s any way to gain access.
and ethically, what's the point in giving hostile corporate groups any money ? I get that you're breaking out of their mega subsidized and profit-locked walled garden, but 'sold units' is still a metric they'll use to positively enforce their strategies going forward, and as with all goods the vulnerabilities will get more and more exotic until totally pushed out of public availability much like the newest console gens.
Exactly, if we want change the sales numbers have to go down. That means don't by LG, Samsung and who have you, it also means telling friends and family to go buy something else... but what?
Unfortunately though I think you are right and the best thing to do is just get one that has the specs you want never connect it to the internet and just get a companion device for the connected stuff like a Shield Pro (aging device but I did not catch up to what was the cool new things for those)
When I brought it home, I never connected it to Ethernet or WiFi. Instead, I connected it to my laptop over USB, then using adb I uninstalled almost every application from it. It took me quite some time to figure out what app is possible to remove and what should be kept to let TV functionality to work. I even had to factory-default it a couple of times because some random apps I removed were crucial for Android to work. :) I think it took me 5-6 hours to clean it. Now it has only basic TV functionality like any dump TV does, I can watch air and cable TV channels, watch movies and play music from USB storage. If there's a need to watch something online, I connect it over HDMI to my small mini-PC that runs FreeBSD. I think I'm satisfied with the result. :-)
PS: Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.
While this couldn't hurt, it also won't stop the TV from being able to connect to wifi. I ran my desktop without an antenna attached for months. The speed noticeably improved when I attached an antenna but it was fine for browsing the web and downloading software updates without one.
When building my PC, I got a PCI WiFi card but it turns out there was also a direct WiFi network interface built into the motherboard somehow
But I don't the GP comment was talking about that; I have also used WiFi without an antenna (PCB or otherwise), and it was also slow for me.
A dummy load is probably the best idea: an impedance mismatch would obliterate any chance of anything working (including Bluetooth fwiw).
If you know what you are doing and have explicitly disconnected/cut all antennas in the motherboard then the only remaining explanation is "accidental antennas".
This is only possible if the WiFi-chip has dangling metal pins/traces/joints whose length is comparable to that of its wavelength, in which case these will act as makeshift antennas. These will pickup ambient WiFi RF, but for this to work at all you need lots of RF power i.e. a very strong signal strength which means you have to be very close to the WiFi router.
The whole thing works because of Physics and not Engineering (the "accidental" part) and hence very iffy (may not work at all) and should not be relied upon.
That being said, without an antenna it is highly improbable that it could still find an open WiFi AP to connect to (especially if you don't have one in your house).
As an example - if you have a motherboard on your computer that supports wifi and comes with a port/plug for an antenna, you could remove that antenna and still receive a signal (IDK about sending) but it would suffer more signal loss due to the lack of antenna.
All that is just a guess of course. People more knowledgeable than me could explain/clarify.
Exactly the same way their PC did; re-read what they said.
I am not the person you asked the question of, but here is the answer;
Smart TVs have a built-in "WiFi-Chip" on the motherboard and its antenna hidden in the TV frame itself, exactly like the antennas in a Smartphone. The different radios on a Smart TV viz. OTA, WiFi, Bluetooth, Satellite, Zigbee etc. all operate at different frequency ranges and hence need their own antennas. Many of these antennas are either a) etched on the motherboard b) hidden within the plastic back frame or c) directly taped to it.
Axiom of RF Wireless - There can be no transmission/reception without an antenna either external or internal.
PS: Since RF Wireless is everywhere today and most people do not have much of an idea of this technology, i very highly recommend the book The Essential Guide to RF and Wireless by Carl Weisman for study. Expressly written for a non-technical audience, it explains everything simply and beautifully. It really gave me the invaluable overview and the grounding i needed to understand this important science/technology.
Did the TCL not have this option?
That's not me for sure. :) But what I'm sure about it that their TVs are made either by Haier or TCL.
F--- Google, but at least the kids know those menus are bullshit, and do not have the wifi password at any rate.
Also, we're probably already to the point where I could just put it on a firewalled network, and have a [chinese open weight] LLM pop the factory android, get root, and reprogram the remote buttons to no-ops.
Or, I could open the remote up, physically cut out the spam buttons, then 3d print an alternative top-half of the shell without holes for them.
So many options, so much enshitification.
We bought it because it has crazy high brightness (it is in a bright room with direct sunlight hitting the panel while we are watching it), and while it can beat back the sun, it cannot do so by just turning all the zones on 100% because it would melt or something.
So, if all the image slopping were turned off, the contrast ratio would drop 100x, and the TV wouldn't really be fit for purpose.
(For when the sun is not actively trying to kill the panel, I have a de-slop shortcut setup. That also has the backlight enhance stuff turned on -- as low as possible -- to get true black on the LCD. It works OK. OLED is not quite there yet for this corner case.)
> the image enhancements.
Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative, even if they make the image subjectively 'pop' or motion appear smoother on typical scenes, they'll introduce artifacts or trade-offs in other kinds of scenes.
In my experience doing a lot of testing over the years with objective signal analysis tools at work as well as subjectively across 7 generations of upgrades in my own home theater, the trade-offs aren't worth it. There are a few context and content specific exceptions but they're quite rare and usually involve slightly improving significantly degraded signals which no longer exist in most home theaters (eg noise reduction in analog sources like laserdisc, DCT macro-block smoothing in highly compressed old MPEG 1/2 sources or dynamic range expansion on legacy SD sources).
With today's 4K and HD digital sources encoded at high bit rates in modern codecs, the director, colorist and mastering engineer can finally deliver their precise intent all the way to your eyeballs. The ~$20 chip calculating synthetic frames and pixels in your TV introduces surface curb appeal at the cost of artifacts and a poorly integrated image. If it actually made the image look better, the director and colorist have more and better tools than that $20 chip that they're already applying to the source. You're just turning a $20 chip loose on 'full auto' to guess at (and often undo or muddy) intentional enhancements manually applied frame by frame over days by experts.
Do whatever you like but I encourage you to critically audition each of those enhancements across a range of source types (4K, HD, HDR, HDR10, SDR, 24, 30, and 60 frame) and diverse scenes (low-light, quick panning, smooth dollies, and synthetic test signals, etc). Once you compare the before/after across that breadth back-to-back you'll see what I mean. I run my calibrated, high-end 3-laser projector (150" screen) as close to neutral, native settings as I can get and it looks sensational. And to be clear I'm not being a purist, if 'enhancements' really improved some scenes meaningfully without degrading other scenes, I'd be "Fuck the director's intent, it's just better." But for every scene an enhancement improves, I can queue up a scene from another film it makes noticeably worse. Fortunately, on most high-end Sony TVs you can get an un-hyped, accurate image in the standard UX without going to the calibrator or factory menus.
Yep, generally you don't want anything the TV manufacturer markets as "enhancements." They basically all add things to the signal that were not part of the director's or video editor's vision. Any cinephile will remind you that there is one correct setting for "brightness," "contrast," "color," and "tint". "Sharpness" should almost always be zero, and any other setting that claims to "enhance" the picture should be turned off for correct output.
The worst ones now are the "motion smoothing" modes that take your normal FPS movie and try to interpolate them up to 60FPS, 120FPS or even 240FPS, giving them that cheap, crappy "soap opera" effect. Turn it off as soon as you turn on your TV for the first time.
Of course a modern console only managing 30fps is the actual 'bug' :-). But I agree that's one of the narrow exception cases where an 'enhancement' might be a net benefit. Although if you're going to use synthetic frames, doing it in the console can be better because intra-frame motion hinting might be available and, even if it's not, the console's frame gen is trained on game content where a TV's chip is cross-function and far less capable (both in look-ahead and motion vector count). But I know some consoles don't have frame gen, so in that case it's a win.
I'm sure it won't be long before these bastards embed a cell phone modem deeply into the device :(
2) Why bother removing the apps if it has no network connection? Defense in depth is sensible to me, but maybe there's something else I'm missing ...
3) Why not buy a large desktop computer monitor, or are those no longer 'dumb' either?
1) All the google data gathering crap, and all the "give permission to garbage preload to turn on the microphone" bullshit (and look for a physical mic switch; ours has that. Also, turn off notifications, because, do you want notifications telling you the wifi does not work? If you have an android phone, do this on your phone first.
2) Less crap = less backlog of surveillance data if you ever accidentally need to put it online. Also, see (1).
3) You can't get a nice 55"-100" desktop monitor for < $2K.
Ppl worry so much about privacy, but are fine having kids watch TV when they eat breakfast.
Plug in an Apple TV or any other streaming device if you want digital content. If your want terrestrial content ensure the TV has the relevant input connections on the back.
Second, never use the "apps" built into the TV.
Next, don't plug Ethernet into the TV. Plug HDMI cables into the TV.
Use a box of your choice on the other end of the HDMI cables. This is now the box that you trust. (Roku? Shield? Blu-ray? MacBook? PC? Linux? Playstation? XBox? Whatever you want.)
The Smart TV itself is now fine. Choose the devices you plug into it to play content. The TV just shows it.
We have to use the actual TV remote to debug some audio issues or disable the motion blur stuff again every once in awhile, but otherwise it might as well just be a display for the AppleTV. I’ve only seen the actual home screen of the TV a handful of times.
I guess it’s probably still spying on us somehow, and it seems like different models make using the AppleTV remote and booting right into the AppleTV harder than others, so your mileage may vary.
Others just overlay banners on top of the video.
Caveat emptor.
This. Never trust software switches. See my other reply for what I suggest instead of "streaming boxes" that aren't any better than the TV firmware.
They still need to tie it to you. If you've not given it a shred of personal information, it has to be fingerprinting via surreptitious audio/video recording, or else by obtaining the purchase info from the retailer (like the name and billing address from your credit card) and matching that by serial number (which would have to be recorded during purchase).
(It has an HDMI port, but it's clearly a second class citizen in the menus, etc. Default to HDMI on power up is intentionally broken. It's also intentionally designed to turn into a brick if we ever lose the remote. At boot, it puts a screen up saying to press a button on the remote if you want it to display anything else, and that screen never times out. If you plug in an HDMI input, it says "HDMI input detected; press OK.". There's no "OK" button on the projector itself. You have to press the OK button on the remote.)
Yes, I want to buy a projector this Black Friday (Hisense PX3-Pro).
Can you explain why you can't just not give the TV your Wi-Fi password?
Or are we worried about the case when the TV did have Wi-Fi (due to it being mandatory for some initial setup, say), but we don't trust that "Forget Network" and "Wi-Fi off" are actually honored?
Suppose the device surreptitiously reconnects to Wi-Fi in spite of being told to forget it. You may be able to block it in your router and failing that, change the access point password.
No?
Doesn't exactly sound like a thing to be that concerned about if you never plug in your TV. If you buy a TV right now and never plug it in, how would it know about any future deal with Xfinity to connect to its open networks? And if it had a feature to connect to random open Wi-Fi networks right now, that wouldn't be hard to prove. My LG has never shown up in my Wi-Fi client list despite my open guest Wi-Fi. You can even test it by naming your guest network "Xfinity WiFi".
Taking apart your TV and pulling out the wireless radio sounds like absolute overkill to me. Feel free to do it if it makes you feel better. It will definitely not allow it to send data (over Wi-Fi) under any circumstance. I'm just not convinced that the alternative is that much riskier.
But if the TV manufacturer is smart in their spying game, they could also be probing for any public SSIDs to connect to when no local internet access is setup.
But also, you think tv manufacturers are sane? They have proven that they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, in my opinion.
I assume at some point, appliance manufacturers will start "partnering" with things that actually need WiFi for exfiltration purposes. Phones would be a good place to start.
That way, we'd need to either Faraday cage our friends' phones, not invite them over, or send marketing pervs video feed of our moldy pickles.
Easiest rule in security is to just disable unnecessary services. If you are never using the WiFi, you might as well disable the hardware completely
It may be trivial to prove again and again, but it is even more trivial to just disconnect it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HEC
Any chance the TV can phone home via that? One would have to make sure the HDMI cable physically doesn't have the Ethernet pairs, or set the trusted box to filter the traffic.
Other than that, I agree regarding TV, with one caveat: you might want to update the firmware right away, or at some point. The device might need to phone home for that. In order to achieve that, you can put up a temp WLAN AP with your smartphone.
With regards to my STB: I am considering cancelling all my subscription services and simply downloading everything to my NAS. This already runs Jellyfin. Then all I need is a Jellyfin client and HDMI. Perhaps a RPi 4 or RPi 5 would be suffice there.
Why?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/apr/25/goog...
https://theweek.com/tech/wifi-signals-now-tracking-users-at-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlbjUvkoyBA
And here's the opt-out steps to get Google to stop scanning your Wifi: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632#how_opt_out&z...
Sure, I would be disturbed that it's doing that sort of thing in spite of Wi-Fi being explicitly turned off.
What is the threat to me though?
Also, how do you pay for streaming channels, etc., if you don't give it any information?
Without either doing the fingerprinting from surreptitious audio recording in the room that other commenters mention, or else matching the unit serial number to the purchaser (requiring the retailer to leak personal info to the manufacturer), they can't match the unit's location to our identity.
Remember that it doesn't take much to identify someone: Gender, birthdate, and (zip code?) uniquely identify ~80% of Americans. From viewing habits, it should be easy to fingerprint someone - Chicago Bears fan; strong technology interest; on your city block; likes AI porn with Lara Croft; home during day Sa, Su, Tu, Th; watches YouTube videos about ...
They want to be "helpful" and show me they can "work tech" by doing stuff like this. They don't understand that the TV is manipulating them. I don't want to have to explain to them that I'm basically a neurosurgeon and they just tried to impress me by drilling a hole in somebody's head. Because the TV told them to.
Disconnecting the wifi avoids the need for unpleasant conversations.
EDIT: What I am referring to here is the specific allegation that smart TVs will connect to open wireless networks without being commanded to do so. It's not a catch-all for any nefarious thing involving TVs or wireless networks.
LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true' (635 points, 2 months ago, 494 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645480
Also Amazon does this same model with their Sidewalk service, which can run over bluetooth or lora, instead of wifi... and is specifically priced to be usable for large numbers of devices.
If the devices still scan all the time...
Living on the countryside there is no such problem.
If they choose a Firestick or Roku what's the difference? XD
What I’ve ended up doing was I got an LG and never hooked it up to Wifi/internet, and then use an Apple TV to watch things on.
It’s a bit annoying if I want to switch to a game console as Apple TV can’t control the TV’s input channel, but otherwise works very well.
Make sure the TV supports HDMI CEC.
Yeah they do. Go to your shopping center or airport and you'll see LG and Samsung displays everywhere. And that's the key word, 'displays' not 'TVs'.
Both sell large displays meant for 100% user ownership with no spyware or mandatory internet connection, you just have to buy those and not their TVs.
The catch? They come at steep prices compared to consumer TVs, unless you can land a deal on the used market. But that's the cost of turning a profit on screens with no spyware and ads.
Hotel TVs, same panels as consumer models with different supporting hardware and stock calibrations. These are actually dimmer than the consumer models to increase panel longevity.
They tend to lack gaming features like high/variable refresh rate but they're more functional as normal TVs than digital signage displays.
They have similar OSes as the consumer models and can run the same apps but don't have ads unless the operator wants them to and can be centrally managed, support internal IPTV networks, etc.
(I don't care about integrated speakers though)
If you're a videophile you might care. Most people would not notice.
I think what changed was the realisation that even with 4k hardware in theory, what you're actually seeing is so variable based on bandwidth and different services' support for different shows you basically don't know anyway and thus it doesn't really make much sense to care about it.
Besides which, you realise that things that are made to be more enjoyable on 4k, like where that would actually make a difference to how good it is, are probably not that much worth watching anyway outside of demos. Certainly it's not, for example, a factor on which you want to be choosing what series to watch.
And how will my 50 year old mom and 70 year old grandpa know how to do that? "Hey Claude scan the wifi for a LG TV, hack it, root it and give me the keys to install what I want, then lock out LG from access it?"
As always, the sane fix is in government legislation and enforcement of privacy regulations. But this isn't happening since knowledge of smart device spyware across politicians and the voting population is small and governments want to use that data dragnet that smart devices enable for their own means.
Well, why not?
For a long time they haven't been just dumb displays. They also run Tizen or WebOS for digital signage applications.
I don't think that the cost of TVs has gone down when they added spyware and ads.
You could say that that's the cost of turning less profits, rather, and I suspect that TV manufacturers keep the costs of normal displays high just to discourage their purchase by normal people.
"Anymore"? So far there's no evidence any TVs are using it, so you're safe for now.
Yes because you have to fetch a shitty TV remote with buttons inspired by a Boeing 747 cockpit, which must be aimed directly at the TV because it uses shitty infra-red.
Am I close? :)
The whole TV medium was fully and expertly enshittified by advertising decades ago.
The next level is today: Now you buy a giant plastic browser that includes a fully enshittified surveillance OS.
There is even a spec (as yet unused...) for Ethernet over HDMI (HEC , HDMI 1.4). Silicon Image (founder of HDMI) and Broadcom demonstrated the capability to TV manufacturers behind closed doors (says $searchEngine).
Whatever screen you use to watch movies, you will inevitably find your captain's log will contain more joy for the crew by discovering Jellyfin and sailing into deeper waters.
Then you hooked it to an external device of a surveillance capitalism company that trains on your data to manipulate you. Why?
Or plug in a cheap mini PC running a TV friendly Linux distro and give your data to no one.
Apple could easily make tens of billions dollars extra if they spied more on their users.
The biggest indightment of Apple in my mind is the copy and pasting of links into iMessage. iMessages "helpfully" renders a preview so a dumb consumer doesn't have to see an ugly long text of a url. But in doing so, it also happens to hides the utm code that is used for tracking by marketers.
They've got their eye on that tens of billion dollars extra.
Linux is not a viable option for TV for the vast majority of users. There are no sit back, remote driven apps for the services they use.
But JellyFin and Plex exist for people who don’t want that.
Compare that to setting up a home server with a ton of storage, setting up torrenting/newsgroups, software to check for new releases and automatically download them, probably a VPN too… it’s a whole different world.
Source: I work at Apple. The privacy story isn’t just marketing, it’s very real and part of every discussion.
Personally, I use an RPi4 with libreelec, and it works great - including responding to my remote via HDMI-CEC. (There's also no need for any sysadmin with libreelec, which is designed to work out of the box.)
Yes, it "just works". Why wouldn't it?
You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?
I watch any movie or TV show I want in 4k via Kodi, but then can alt tab to a Terminal or a real web browser.
Privacy, and dramatically more functionality than any TV would ship with anyway.
Using this setup to type this message right now on pc hooked to a projector in my garage from my couch.
It turns out we never needed Smart TVs in the first place. Just treat it as a screen for a desktop computer.
Iirc, Amazon uses a tool they call “sidewalk” for this purpose
There’s something called Wi-Fi Direct but it requires explicit pairing. And Sidewalk isn’t on TVs. There’s no evidence of Samsung TVs trying to use each other as relays.
The TV belongs to you and it will obey you with modest effort.
Especially considering some models now refuse to work without seeing an internet connection during the setup procedure
Samsung QB55C-N 55" UHD 4K HDR Commercial Monitor without Wi-Fi
3 HDMI ports. Any downsides using as a TV?
I have a BenQ (710tki iirc) that is like this and I believe it meets all your stated requirements (size, resolution, etc). I’ve been very happy with it.
The main issue switching to a projector is figuring out where you are going to position it (different projectors have different throw distances).
More money and more setup, but very worthwhile in the end IMO.
Not that I would forget that tiny detail when I mounted mine. Of course not.
I guess I am more concerned about random devices at home that need internet to work yet I have no idea what data they send where.
I was able to disable a bunch of stuff on my LG so I never actually see the WebOS interface anymore.