Yup. Works great. All things equal I'd prefer just not buying a damn Smart TV to begin with, but absent that as a realistic option (every 4K TV I've ever seen is smart) I'll happily settle with them never seeing one byte of Internet.

Someone should start a blog where it's all clickbait titles and the articles are all once sentence with the obvious resolution to the bait.

My work health insurance recently offered a free scale and blood pressure monitor, I thought that's a nice perk, I'll use that, so I ordered with the intent of never using their app, just using it for my own tracking. The first time I used it, I got an email from my insurance company congratulating me and giving me suggestions. Both devices have a cellular modem in them, and arrived paired to my identity.

I destroyed them and threw them in a dumpster like that Ron Swanson gif.

All to say, little cellular modems and a small data plan are likely getting cheap enough it's worth being extra diligent about the devices we let into our homes. Probably not yet to the point of that being the case on a tv, but I could certainly see it getting to that point soon enough.

This

How can you as a publisher not look at that an not go: "Seems a bit much".

Fine that you need to run ads and maybe partner with someone to sell those ads, but 226 of them?

It’s just a modern-day MLM scam.

The article goes into that option.

TV Manufacturers: “oh no!” *proceeds to remove all dumb TVs from the market*

They nag.

Funny how the article itself is an ad

Yup, from the Apple TV article linked in the article[1]:

> According to its privacy policy, the company gathers usage data, such as “data about your activity on and use of” Apple offerings, including “app launches within our services…; browsing history; search history; [and] product interaction.” [...] transaction information, account information (“including email address, devices registered, account status, and age”), device information (including serial number and browser type), contact information (including physical address and phone number), and payment information (including bank details).

Yeah, sure, that's privacy, Ars.

[1]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...

At least we can gather and post an actual solution in the top comment.

This is really poor research on their part.

And Emerson has for a LONG time been just an American brand on the cheapest Chinese electronics your money can buy.

The whole article is pretty terrible.

I have a fire tv and run adguard, which does the same thing as pihole, and I can barely tell it's on. It may block some tracking, but I get an increasing amount of ads in the fire tv GUI, not to speak of YouTube ads.

Sometimes I wonder if the people recommending pihole actually tried it. You get much better value out of ublock, smarttube, and so on.

> Buy a cheap smart TV

Why does it have to be cheap? What if I want a killer panel without all the bs?

> Use a small "air mouse" for control

An alternative is something like 'unified remote' on it, then you can even type from your phone without any pain.

> A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.

There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists. It would be ideal to send all the browser context with cookies etc so that you are logged in too and can just start playing whatever you found on PC.

Any for of cast is not an option, rendering has to happen on the TV PC box.

It's not feasible for everyone, but between grocery delivery services, telehealth, etc - if you work remotely anyway, it may be surprisingly feasible to get rid of your car altogether and only Uber/Lyft as needed, at least until robotaxis expand into your area at a fraction of the price of traditional ride-hailing apps.

I looked into this. If I am remembering correctly the price was higher. It is just easier to connect a mini PC to an hdmi port and bypass all of the built in TV functionality.