this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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I never enable the smart part. You want the smart part on a TV you are going to enable telemetry even if hou declined privacy agreements. I don't trust any TV manufacturer, for sure not LG.
I use a seperate setupbox (Shields) that I can control with a pihole. So all my other input sources like my gaming PC’s, or the ones I use for tax and insurance do not get monitored by content recognition from the tv or Google. My LG oled's work fine without updates.
It will be easy to detect if a TV is trying to connect to an open network even if you disabled the networking part. Network sniffers… I would throw out that TV in a heartbeat. Mostly hardware that can't connect to an ip start requesting connection at a frequent rate, like my Nanoleafs blocked by pihole. Very desperate….They are top of the blocked ip's.
Some TVs do not give you that option though. Shield or not, I have one that will straight up block 90% of the screen every 10 minutes if it doesn't have a connection.
I would toss it, but it was 250$ and 65" with a decent display. So I used ssh to get into it and install a firewall to block 90% of the TV from access, including the update service. Also have filtering through my network firewall for ad servers, update servers etc.
So now the scan for a connection works, but they aren't getting much of anything in terms of metrics or telemetry or other information from the TV. I also disabled the default launcher and installed a different one on it as well as jellyfin.
I will never buy another TV like that though, it was an absolute pain to get it working. It should be illegal to hinder usage of a TV just because they are being blocked from invading your privacy.
I would have immediatly returned it to the shop, also I wonder what brand. You are the product…certainly for 250 bucks for a 65 inch TV. They really should have given you 250 dollar + TV. Maybe a year of Netflix premium maximus 8K.
Haha yeah, I agree.
It's a Toshiba 65C350 Fire TV.
I considered returning it but I'm used to tinkering with stuff so I just dealt with it. I won't do that again though lol. Was not one of the more fun things to mess with.
It'd be nice if I could flash it completely to remove all their junk. I mean, the device is running Android of some sort so it's possible but I'm not that invested in trying to figure that out.
Heh, I understand taking up a tinkering challange. Seems there are custom roms that you might be able to flash on a fire tv but there is a chance of bricking it. You need boot menu installed and root access very likely.
Yeah, I did look a little bit and saw that.
If I recall correctly the TV is kind of in this in between update where I was able to get into it and lock it down the way that I want but I can't get it to give me root access. From what I remember I shouldn't have even been able to get into it at all but was still able to.
Fun stuff.
I'll look into it again though since it's been about a year. Maybe there is something new.
I did not want to enable you, I only did some low effort searches.