alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?
I haven’t owned a TV in years and would like one that respects my privacy. Are there any TV’s which do this well? I am looking for something in the 60”to 80”range and would like a 4k display with at least 60hz display. I don’t mind paying a premium.
I have heard good things about Apple TV as a better alternative to most smart TV native apps. Would some TV’s pair better with this than others for privacy? I don’t want the TV doing anything other than being the display for Apple TV.
I am curious what success others have had.
Comments
I use a projector plugged into a tiny Linux box.
buy a big monitor and hook whatever you want to it. samsung sells them and theyre about the same price as a tv, if not cheaper
Well, I have CRTs in most of the rooms in my home. That's because of an unrelated condition for which I refuse to be treated, but they are great for privacy!
Another slightly pricier option is buy a digital signage display. These are screens intended for use in like retail floors or even outdoors. They tend to be extra durable, resistant to burn-in, very bright and devoid of most fluffy end user features.
You can literally just buy any Sony and turn it onto dumb TV mode and not connect it to a network.
That's it, that's all you need to do, and the level of crazy over engineering and spend by some people below achieves literally nothing more at great difficulty.
A large format monitor that does not connect to the Internet nor has any smarts at all.
Also, do not plug any Internet-facing devices into it, have a captive SBC that connects to a LAN server hosting (legally owned) videos.
I have a 42” tv from this cheap brand i found in MediaWorld in italy (i guess it’s called MediaMarkt in Germany and Switzerland): it’s called Ok.
It’s just great. Besides decoding digital tv it does essentially nothing.
If i want smart features i plug in an amazon fire stick.
I had it for six years now, i still love it.
At this point I'd just hooking up a gaming monitor (a very large one) with separate speakers and low-spec computer to run it.
I researched a bit for business displays from Samsung and these also have enshittified with "smart" features, so it lost my trust as well.
Rather than trying to get a TV which doesn't have blatant spyware (when in all likelyhood, they all do, or will get one in a software update), I would suggest solving the problem the other way around - get a TV you know you can disable that functionality in. Trusting the manufacturer is a recipe for disaster.
I stripped out the bluetooth+wifi module from my TV and keep it disconnected from ethernet. Now it doesn't matter what it tries to collect, it can't send it anywhere.
SOFTWARE SWITCHES CAN NEVER BE TRUSTED!
A "Dumb TV" that doesn't have any Android / set top OS on it. Plug a debian box into it via HDMI, and you're all set.
The Russian user manuals for LG OLED TVs list the exact part numbers for the WiFi and Bluetooth modules. Search the PDF for IEEE and it will be listed. The English manuals omit this information!
I think desoldering the WiFi antennas and leaving the Bluetooth antenna connected is also a viable option. Although I think a 50 Ohm dummy load is needed if doing that(?).
Just get a big monitor or projector and whatever TV box you want.
If you really want privacy there's always the NUC running youtube.com in a browser
I just buy any TV, never allow it anywhere near the WiFi network, and attach an Apple TV
Unless… they’re not putting SIM cards in modern TVs or anything right?
What my own research led me to: https://www.viewsonic.com/global/products/commercial-display... (OS-Free Commercial Display, all sizes available) + HTPC.
Next TV I buy im connecting to to Claude code and lobotomizing it...
I love all these people spending money and tearing apart their TVs instead of changing their WiFi password and not giving the new one to it
My honest answer at this point is none.
It's like every 3 months someone asks some variant of this question.
Absolutely every single TV that you don't hook up to your wifi. Easy.
Don’t connect it to the internet, only to your lan (on a separate vlan) connecting to your jelly and *arr setup, or, you can get a tv box, flash it with vanilla android, have kodi and addon pointing to your jelly server, and from that tv box is an hdmi to your TV, same is also doable with a rpi. It won’t be plug and play but it’s a weekend project, because there are no tv manufacturers who cares about privacy, or get a dumb tv and connect an hdmi to your pc but you will lose new features.
Only the one you gut with LLM first. Even when you disconnect it from the internet these devices often connect to unsecured WiFi's around you and snitch about you. There could be more tricks they do.
I love this: Just hook up your Apple TV for streaming.
A monitor. You will lose some controls over color & clarity (motion smoothing). But it will provide the best “dumb TV” experience.
I use my monitor with a fire TV stick and it renders very well. LG 4k panel.
Tvs can themselves have their privacy improved by never connecting it to WIFI, except, maybe for software updates, if needed (rare).
The smarts you connect to the TV can vary.
Apple Ts manage things in some good ways.
NVidia Shields are good in others for Android TV.
The Android TV platform is likely more customizable (check youtube the past few weeks) to get it how you want.
Last, but not least, some poeple may just hook up a web browser to the TV and then contain that.
A lot of the advice here seens to be "disable wifi, don't plug in ethernet, use a computer or similar to provide content".
This is good advice. But I'd consider it the absolute baseline. I'd be much more interested in hearing about TVs that'll still try to get to the internet (neighbor's badly secured IoT network, bluetooth, 5G) or ones that cripple themselves when you tamper with wifi.
Do you really need a propaganda box? Connect with family or friends
Honestly, anything pre-2020.
Read a paperbook
Avoid Vizio at all costs!
I recently picked one up at Sam's Club. Since my use was only to display an external HDMI source, I never even configured Wifi. Unfortunately, they're now wise to this. If it detects its been offline for ten or so start-ups, the TV will 'helpfully' force you into the Wifi config workflow on the next start. It seems to keep an internal counter in flash memory which nothing but a factory reset will clear. In my tests, it seemed like it can be kept offline forever but at the cost of manually dismissing the Wifi config workflow with three clicks on the remote every ~10 power-ons.
The TV also will not turn on and just display an external HDMI source even though it has a "Remember Last Source" feature. That feature does work as expected with any internal streaming source but external sources must first be manually selected with the remote after each power on (also undocumented in the manual).
I figured this out because I bought this small TV to be a wall-mounted screen in the dedicated bathroom of our home theater room. It's only job is to turn on while someone is in the little bathroom and display a copy what's on the main 150" projector screen in the next room, then turn off when they leave. The on/off is handled by a motion sensor and standard Home Assistant automation but after power on it correctly shows the Last Selected external HDMI source for 1 second, then blanks the screen. The source is already selected and working but being blacked out until you manually re-select the same source with the remote (only if it's external). This is clearly an undocumented anti-pattern added specifically to prevent the TV being used unattended as a display screen, picture frame, digital sign etc. Why? Because Vizio (now owned by WalMart) doesn't get rev share if it's: 1) Not online, and 2) Only displaying external sources. That's why it demands manual "proof-of-life" before it'll grudgingly deliver the basic functionality it claims on the box.
This made me angry - and the TV was otherwise the perfect size and feature set for my use case. So I programmed an ESP32 with an IR emitter so that every time the TV powers on it sends the remote presses to manually clear the "Please Connect Internet" message and re-select the already-selected external HDMI. Very annoying to be forced to figure this out but now it works fine and no one even sees the annoying messages as they're already gone before by the time we enter and see the screen. So, fuck Vizio :-). Although, I'm pretty sure almost all current consumer TVs now sell all your data exactly the same. The only differences may be the depth of dark patterns they deploy to resist offline usage.
To be fair, aside from all the super evil dark patterns, it's a shockingly good quality small TV (24-inch) for $88. Although it's obviously not a high-end display (no native HDR or 24fps), the chipset does do a decent job tone mapping external HDR (and HDR10) sources to SDR and it does proper 3:2 pull-down to display 24 frame external sources at 60fps - which very few TVs in this size do well (or at all). This is why I kept it and spent the time 'fixing' it. Of course, this is only because the TV is subsidized by the $35-$60 avg yearly revenue TV manufacturers reportedly can collect from advertising, app install payments, rev shares and selling all your viewing data. For $88 at local retail, it's probably being sold at a small loss. What's sad is I would have paid double that for the same TV without the dark patterns (in fact, I did buy and return two 24" TVs before this one for $160 and $200 but they couldn't even display external HDR or 24fps sources at all - which was a requirement since this secondary display has to display sources configured for the main projector).
Just get any old TV and use the HDMI input and don’t connect it to the internet. The fears of it phoning home anyway even when you don’t configure wifi are overblown (almost no TVs can do this), as are the privacy implications. Nobody cares that you watch Severance and MCU movies. It’s sort of like people who tape over their laptop camera but leave the mic alone, as if 86400 photos of your face are somehow private and sensitive but all of the conversations in the room are not.
I'm a big fan of my Sony KV-25C5E. /s
When it comes to TVs you can buy in a big box store today, I'm not sure there are any TVs that fulfil your requirements. Everything's more or less on a scale of privacy to quality, where on one side you have the panels of 10 years ago with dumb electronics from brands you've never heard of, and on the other side are the LG panels, but with LG non-privacy. The other notable brands you've probably heard of fall closer to LG than to the no-name brands.
You can probably scrounge up a decent modern-ish panel on the used market that's old enough to not have been shipped with malware, but then you're betting on it not having been updated to receive the malware, or relegating yourself to rooting it the instant you get it home.
My unspoken assumption is that you don't want to give money to evil companies. If you yourself are fine with giving your money to evil people, then you can Just™ buy an LG panel and root it.
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Get a panel and controller from China
I have not checked the details recently, but it should still be possible to get an aftermarket "dumb TV" generic controller board to fit the panel, as LCD panels have a somewhat standardised controller-panel interface.
6 years ago, discussion of an article about such: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24877363 (site hasn't survived, but article can still be found in archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre...)
I'd recommend a search, this gets asked at least once a year