Throw Away Your Television
It's a repeat.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a song called “Throw Away Your Television” and if you listen closely to the lyrics what you’ll hear is a warning about a numbing box in the corner of the room that both entertains you and dulls you at the same time.
That box has since had an upgrade. It still does both of these things, but now it also collects a whole load of data and sends them somewhere you will never see.
I found this out by accident, which is how most people find it out, if they ever do at all.
What The Pi-hole Saw
I run a Pi-hole at home, with Unbound behind it, so my network resolves its own DNS rather than handing every lookup an entity that I have no control over. It is a small, satisfying bit of housekeeping, and one of its side effects is that you get to see all of the calls which are made by all of the various devices (smart or not) in your home. Most of the time it is pretty routine, but when I connected my “smart” TV up to it, it became anything but.
It made thousands of calls home per hour, a steady torrent of requests to the manufacturer’s servers and a rotating set of ad domains and those related to analytics platforms. This is made all-the-more concerning when you add in that I do not use a single one of its smart features. I have never signed into its “app store”. Everything I watch comes off my own home media server, over my own network and in my own house. The television was not just doing the work I bought it to do, but had a second shift doing a quieter job that I never agreed to. This was happening thousands of times an hour, for nobody’s benefit but the manufacturer’s.
So I did the obvious thing. I found the domains it was reaching for and I blocked them using the Pi-hole. I didn’t add anything else into my setup but a blocklist telling those lookups to go nowhere.
The result is the thing the industry does not want you to know: the television still works perfectly.
It turns on, it switches inputs, it shows me my media at full quality. Everything I actually use survived. The only thing that died was its ability to phone home. It has been sitting there, mute and obedient, but just as capable, ever since.
Automatic Content Recognition
The part that unsettled me was that I was not running anything smart, and it was reporting anyway, from the moment I foolishly gave it access to my WiFi. This is by design, and the mechanism has a name: automatic content recognition (ACR). ACR is a fingerprinting system built into the set at the chipset level. It takes regular snapshots of what is on your screen, reduces each one to a fingerprint, and matches it against a huge library to work out precisely what you are watching.
ACR does not care where the picture came from. Live broadcast, a streaming app, a DVD, a games console, or a media server plugged into HDMI, it fingerprints all of it the same way. A 2024 study presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference found that ACR keeps working even when the smart TV is used purely as a dumb external display, it even connects when the TV itself is idle. The same study found that switching the setting off does stop the traffic to the ACR servers, which is the one genuinely useful thing about this whole business.
In other words: the spying is not a feature of the apps you choose to run. It is a feature of the television itself, and it watches the screen regardless of where the content itself is coming from.
What The Data Is Actually For
None of this is theoretical, because one manufacturer has already been caught doing it at scale and was rightly fined for it.
In 2017 the US Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General settled with Vizio for 2.2m dollars. The complaint laid out what had been happening since 2014: Vizio’s sets captured second-by-second viewing data from around eleven million televisions, pulling in content from cable, broadcast, streaming, and anything plugged into them. At its peak the operation gathered up to 100bn data points a day. Vizio then appended demographic details to each household, including sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, and home ownership, and sold the result to third parties on a per-television basis. These IP addresses allowed data brokers to tie TVs to people, so a piece of advertising that is ignored on the sofa could follow someone onto their phone.
This is the crucial thing to understand about the business, and it is not a secret. In its own filings before the settlement, Vizio described its viewing-data operation to investors as an asset. And to be clear, to the many data-hungry businesses out there it really is. Who would turn down a real-time feed of household behaviour worth more than hardware sales? The televisions were close to a delivery mechanism and the resulting data was the product. In December 2024 Walmart completed a 2.3bn-dollar acquisition of Vizio, and it was explicit that it wanted the SmartCast operating system and its eighteen million-plus active accounts to feed its own advertising arm.
Nobody spends that to sell you a slightly better TV. They spend it to snoop on what you do in the comfort of your own living room for entertainment.
And Vizio is only the case that reached a courtroom. The same model runs across the industry. A company called SambaTV supplies the ACR backend for Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, and others, with its tracking built into more than forty-million devices worldwide. An earlier measurement study, tellingly titled “The TV is Smart and Full of Trackers,” watched fifty-seven smart TVs across forty-one homes and found them reaching out to tracking and advertising domains constantly. I felt quite proud in reading that there was an academic version of exactly what I found out through tinkering in my own home.
Most manufacturers do let you turn this off, and turning it off does reduce the traffic. The catch is that they bury the switch (dark patterns anyone?) and give it a name designed to mean nothing, so it hides behind blandly reassuring labels like Viewing Information Services, or Smart Interactivity, or Viewing Data, many menus deep and often enabled by default on the walk through the setup wizard you clicked past to get to the football. They give you the option, but they sure as heck aren’t going to walk you to it.
Why You Cannot Just Buy A Normal One
The obvious answer is to buy a television that simply cannot do this. Good luck.
The dumb TV is close to extinct at any size you would actually want in a living room. Samsung, LG, Sony, TCL, Hisense, and Vizio have all stopped making consumer sets without a smart platform, because that is where the money is. A television sold near cost makes money over the course of its life through data and advertising; a set with no snooping is a set with no business model, and so they’ve gone the way of the dodo.
What is left splits into three narrow options. There are ultra-budget models from names you kind of find familiar, which are also of considerably-lower spec than you’d want to have in your front room in 2026. There are commercial signage displays, the screens built for shop windows and waiting rooms, which are truly dumb but cost 2-3 times the price of a consumer set of the same size and ship with very bad sound systems built in. And then there is the workaround everyone falls back on, which is to buy a normal smart TV and simply never let it near your network. The market has decided that wanting a screen that is only a screen makes you a weirdo who is not worth serving.
What You Can Actually Do
You do not have to accept the arrangement, and you do not have to be especially technical to refuse it. In rough order of effort, here is what works.
Never connect it to the internet. A television that cannot reach the network cannot report anything, cannot fingerprint you to a server, and cannot serve you ads on its home screen. Skip the Wi-Fi step in setup, or forget the network if you already joined one. Feed it from a device you control instead, a media box or a home server over HDMI.
Block it at the network. This is what I did. A Pi-hole, ideally with Unbound so your DNS stays in your own house. Watch what your TV is asking for and refuse the calls home while leaving everything else intact. Block the manufacturer’s telemetry and the ACR and ad domains, and the set carries on as a display without the surveillance.
Dig out the opt-out. If you will not touch the network, go through the settings and turn off anything called viewing information, ACR, smart interactivity, or personalised ads. These things are buried on purpose so dig deep.
Consider a commercial signage display. The business-oriented panels from the likes of Samsung’s BE series, NEC, LG’s commercial line, and Sharp ship without a consumer smart platform. You’ll pay a lot and you will need something better to not have a terrible sonic experience.
Sidestep the category entirely. A large computer monitor, 43 inches and 4K for somewhere around 3-5 hundred pounds, has no operating system, no microphone, and nothing to phone home with. Buyer beware that you may have to have a lot of other kit to make this work. On top of this, a second-hand TV from a few years back, or a projector, both tend to be dumber than anything new on the shelf.
Whichever you pick, the pattern is the same one that fixes most of these problems: put the intelligence in a device you actually control, and leave the screen as a screen. My media server does the processing and my TV just looks pretty.
The Bigger Picture
So, as this story has revealed, you are not the customer of a modern television any more than you are the customer of a supermarket loyalty card; these devices are instead here to track and measure you.
The good news is that this is one of the rare privacy problems with a genuinely simple fix, because the whole scheme depends on the TV being able to reach the internet. Take that away and the spying stops, while the watching goes on exactly as before.
So you can heed Anthony Kiedis’ warning and throw away your television, or you can follow my instruction and keep it… but just make sure you cut off from ever reaching their servers.
Your home network will thank you for it.
Sources
Given smart TV privacy risks, you might be better off with a ‘dumb’ TV (Proton, that’s us!) — https://protonvpn.com/blog/smart-tv-privacy-risk
VIZIO to Pay $2.2 Million to FTC, State of New Jersey (Federal Trade Commission) — https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2017/02/vizio-pay-22-million-ftc-state-new-jersey-settle-charges-it-collected-viewing-histories-11-million
What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen (FTC business blog) — https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2017/02/what-vizio-was-doing-behind-tv-screen
Vizio Holdings Form S-1/A (SEC), describing Inscape and “up to 100 billion” daily viewing data points — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001648158/000119312515350398/d946612ds1a.htm
Who Owns Your Smart TV? Roku, Vizio & Privacy (FlashRouters), on the 2024 Walmart/Vizio SmartCast acquisition — https://blog.flashrouters.com/2026/06/21/who-owns-your-smart-tv-roku-vizio-privacy/
Connected Devices: Smart TVs & IoT (Data Broker Directory), on the $2.3bn Walmart deal and 18M+ accounts — https://codamail.com/articles/data-broker-directory/connected-devices.html
Automated content recognition (ACR), smart TVs, and ad-tech infrastructure, Ramon Lobato (2025), on Samba TV inside Sony/Toshiba/Panasonic — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565251327885
Watching TV with the Second-Party: ACR Tracking in Smart TVs (ACM Internet Measurement Conference, 2024) — https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689013
The TV is Smart and Full of Trackers (arXiv 1911.03447) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.03447
You Can Still Buy a “Dumb” TV, but Should You? (How-To Geek) — https://www.howtogeek.com/you-can-still-buy-a-dumb-tv-but-should-you/
Best Dumb TVs That Leave Smart Features Behind (The Droid Guy), on commercial displays and the state of the market in 2026 — https://thedroidguy.com/best-dumb-tvs-that-leave-smart-features-behind-1263197
Dumb TVs Are Scarce: These Are Your Best Alternatives (MakeUseOf), on monitors and projectors — https://www.makeuseof.com/best-alternatives-non-smart-tv/
ANY further details on how to obtain and set up the Pi piece you mentioned would be greatly appreciated. And thank you for this article.
Hi. I’m not sure where to make this request, but I’d love to do a Substack LIVE with someone from Proton about email and device security.