Haha, no. They monitor your ad plays so dns blocking or pi-hole won’t work.

A lot of these TVs (and most IoT devices) phone home directly to IP addresses, bypassing DNS resolution entirely. Maybe you can block some ad domains from showing, but all the info about you is still being sent back to build a profile. At most, you maybe can block only some analytics (google analytics) or error reporting (bugsnag or sentry) domains at most. Even your current Smart/Android TV already does this.

The only way is to check your router logs, figure out which IP addresses are responsible for what, and block them using the router’s firewall, but this involves a lot of trial and error and is beyond the scope (and patience) of most people.

Some will say “but it’s free bro”, but with the amount of tracking they’re doing, they should actually be paying you to use it.

This post has been edited by dev/numb: May 17 2023, 01:03 AM