If you’ve been hesitant about getting a smart TV or have been worried about your TV watching you, I have two pieces of bad news. First, you aren’t going to find a decent TV that doesn’t run a smart TV platform. Second, that platform can almost certainly spy on you in some way. The good news is that you can actually dumb down your smart TV, or at least cut off the parts that are spying on you. It’s probably a lot easier than some of the methods you’ve been hearing about, too.
I’ve been seeing a lot of talk lately about people using AI to de-smart their smart TVs, cutting out tracking, ads, and, ironically, AI assistants. Projects like the AI-coded CleanYourTV and Projectivity Launcher trim down or selectively overhaul your Google TV-based television, and DumbTV does the same thing for Fire TVs. You go through a few esoteric but fairly direct steps to load them on your TV, and they overwrite the interface to cut out the pieces that are watching you, serving ads, or just slowing everything down.
I can respect these projects, and if you want to try them out, go ahead. But you don’t need to go to those lengths to get a simpler experience that doesn’t track you. Here are some easier steps you can take that don’t require any knowledge of ADB sideloading or how to use terminal commands from your computer.
Turn Off ACR
Most of the spying functions on TVs like ACR can be turned off if you know where to look.
This is the big one. Your TV might be spying on you by default, but you should also be able to stop that. Automatic content recognition (ACR) is a “feature” on smart TVs that monitors and identifies what you watch and collects that data for targeted advertising or for sale to third parties. Fortunately, you can opt out of it.
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On Amazon’s Fire TV platform, navigate to Settings > Preferences > Privacy Settings > Automatic Content Recognition. Turn that off, along with Device Usage Data, Collect App, and Over-The-Air Data. For more details and…