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Comment by Molitor5901 | Hacker News Reader

I purchased a television in 2019 and recently gave it away because I never used it. It was an LG and there were so many annoyances with it - slow software; branded buttons I could not change their functions; lack of transparency that it wasn't spying on me; advertisements and so much more, for more money.

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I have an LG OLED from ~2020 in my office which I've never connected to the internet. The picture quality is great. When I turn it on (using my video game console or Apple TV), it goes straight to that input. Other than first setting up the picture and audio and changing volume, I've never seen the interface nor have I seen ads. I have a much cheaper TCL TV with Roku built in, and I still have never connected it to the internet. It works similarly with an Apple TV.

Having a large TV isn't a choice everyone makes, and that's ok. However, I don't think either TV is spying on me in any way that I care about.

I mean you may not think TVs are spying on you but it’s not something that just came out of nowhere.

News stories nowadays have enshittified the knowledge on it, I tried to search for the Vault7 leak without the keyword Vault7 in it but by searching for “tv spying on you leak” paraphrased a bunch of different ways and all I got back from Google was the awful clickbait SEO optimized GARBAGE.

But if the CIA was exposed for doing this shit 7 years ago back in 2017 when Smart TVs were a thing for sure but far from the only option compared to now where if you have a TV people automatically expect it to be a smart TV.

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/

PS: its so messed up what they did to Julian Assange

If the CIA is spying on my TV using zero day exploits, I have very big problems!

I don't think it's worth TV manufacturer's time and effort to find ways to exfiltrate the BS I might say around my TV in ways that go beyond using a configured network connection, which I said is not something I have on any televisions under my control.

I hate the branded buttons. My tv has ones for apps Ive never even heard of, but I cant just assign one to plex: the only streaming app I actually use

On my Google Chromecast it was possible to download an app that lets me reassign the Netflix button to Plex. I also reassigned the Youtube button to Freetube.

That's the worst. My remote doesn't have numbers, not even arrows in a traditional sense. But it does have 4 branded buttons, 2 of which I never heard of.

Hopefully this will help someone else with a similar issue.

I had this problem as well, so I bought the Google TV Streamer box and installed an alternative launcher called Dispatch. $10 for a lifetime license. No ads and the interface is Content, not app focused. Works pretty great and the dev is super responsive.

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