Your TV Is Spying on You, but I Can Show You How to Make It Stop

"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further." —Darth Visio, possibly

The deal was a simple one: free TV included ads, and pay TV didn't. Not only are streaming services altering the deal, but your TV manufacturer is also turning your TV into a two-way telescreen straight out of George Orwell's "1984."

Big Brother is watching you watch TV for real.

Frustrated consumers have watched almost helplessly as their smart TVs and streaming boxes — hardware we paid for! — have become digital ad platforms.

For those concerned about privacy and restoring the balance between ads and paid TV, things have gotten nothing but worse.

Samsung and LG, two top TV manufacturers, are both expanding their use of automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to track whatever you watch on "your" TV — from whatever source — and then sell it to advertisers and Lord knows who else.

While I knew then that Roku was putting ads on owners' home screens, the company is also testing a feature that "would force viewers to sit through effectively a mid-roll ad when clicking from the Roku City screensaver to return to home screen," according to Digiday.

Visio's revenues were about $89 billion in the last quarter of 2022, but only $3 billion was selling TVs and speakers. The rest came from selling ads and your data. "In Q1 2024," Ars Technica reported today, "Vizio reported $88.3 million gross profit for Platform+ [selling ads and your data] and a $7.2 million loss for its devices business."

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Ars Technica this week, "Nobody wants a snooping and snitching television, but lately that's all you can buy."

While I can't stop Hulu or Amazon from putting ads on their shows, I can help you restore a big part of your privacy. It only takes two steps, but one of them you might not like.

First, you've got to get your TV off the internet.

I was shocked when we got our sons a 4K TV to go with the PS5 that it would not let you operate it at all until you had connected it to your wifi. So I changed my network's password to something easy to "type" on a TV remote, connected the TV to the wifi, and then changed the password back to the original.

There are settings to disable internet access, but I don't trust them. Better just to disable its internet access via your wifi password.

Can you imagine giving your actual password to a device whose security was likely farmed out to the lowest bidder, just so that companies can spy on you? And yet millions of people do.

But you have to get your streaming services somehow — and this is the part you might not like.

You're going to need a streaming box, and there's only one that isn't an ad/spyware platform: Apple TV.

I loved the original Apple TV for its clean user interface but everything from the second generation on has been a hot mess. But it's still less of a hot mess than the competition from Roku, Amazon, or Google, and Apple doesn't sell your info. You'll still have to deal with the ads your streaming services hit you with, but at least you'll be free of third-party spyware and ads.

Apple TV boxes are overpriced, but I choose to think of it as the price I would have paid for a TV that isn't loaded with spyware, assuming I could still buy one.

Part of the problem lies with consumers when we insist on paying the lowest possible price without considering anything else. And so those of us who do care, have to go to extra trouble and expense to win back the privacy everybody else gave away for discount TV.

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