What do you want advice about?
The best smart tv to replace last remaining “dumb” tv and chord cutting, that is the least privacy invasive What have you considered or looked at already?
At present i have a home wifi network with an IOT network, of which the tv will be placed on. Any accounts i need to make will be generated to have their own individual logins. Im also not particularly app happy so will keep them to a minimum In brief, tell us about your privacy threat model?
Threat model i guess is low, i am just looking for the least invasive choices from peoples experience and knowledge, and any personal experiences with particular units
Not a TV… but an interesting project which can run on something (old computer for example) connected to your tv : https://plasma-bigscreen.org unfortunately it’s not ready to install on any «smart» tv and replace the OS of the TV yet. I would love that.
Otherwise you can do what I do : I have a «smart» tv (google tv) but I never logged in to a google account on it, never connected to the internet (if a firmware update is necessary I download the file on my pc and put it on an usb stick to install on the tv), I deactivated all unnecessary background processes and pre-installed apps and I… actually never used the «smart» interface of this TV. I only use it as a dumb tv to game and watch my tv shows or movies from my home server. In a perfect world I would love to be able to erase the google tv system of the tv and replacing it with something open source and privacy oriented.
If you don’t need apps, most TVs, without network access, should work. That’s how I’ve set up my LGs, older Samsung, and a relatives Sony. TVs tend to have poor security, and apps tend to fall behind on updates. Not to mention the processors, with TVs slowing down, when you install a bunch of services, on them. IF you require apps, look at a separate device, such as an Apple TV (best for privacy), an Android stick (Nvidia’s Shield is the best, but be warned, there’s a boat load of telemetry, ads, etc), or a Roku (no experience with them).
One thing to note, Bluetooth. Several brands DO NOT allow you to turn this off, by default. Meaning it’ll be constantly pinging devices, and cluttering up your network. Last time I checked, Sony does allow this, as the TV runs Android. The same should be true with any Android TVs, but can’t say for certain. LG requires you to buy a separate service remote, to get access to more advanced settings, and the ability to turn this off. My older Samsung devices had the ability to disable it via debug codes, when the TV was on Standby… Doing a quick search, I THINK this still might be the case, but can’t be 100% sure.
I had never actually looked into an apple tv 4k, it makes sense to use something like that instead of the tv itself. I found this article below on reasonably priced tv’s that can be pretty “dumb”, and off line:
any TV you don’t connect to the internet coupled with a cheap media PC and controller.
Of course you could then find a way to torrent linux ISOs onto it. Obviously we wouldn’t want to be downloading TV shows onto it because that’s illegal, wouldn’t we?
