Television, drug of the nation

I trust Android, and use it on my phone too.

But it's the manufacturers I do not trust.

Android today, TV or phone, are where manufacturers of laptops were a decade ago. HP would load on their 3rd party crap, and it would be full of malware... Lenovo would load on theirs, and it was just shoddily made and full of security holes.

I trust Google to keep Android secure and for any data gathered to be used in a responsible/protective manner (they never give data away, but will use it themselves and the way they do so it balanced by their caution not to break trust).

So for me... the key is to get as vanilla an Android as possible.

On phone that means the Google produced ones, but for TV that isn't as obvious. I thought the Sony was reasonably vanilla, but it turns out not (even their Netflix calls home far more often than Netflix on any other device).

And the Samba.tv thing is terrible... just go look at https://platform.samba.tv/ and delve around. There's all kind of things in there, from knowing what you are watching within 2.5 seconds... through to selling your data for re-targetting or integrating digital adverts over the broadcast stream based on your data.

It's capitalist surveillance state at it's maximum... and the volume of data is nut.

There are people who replied to my twitter who disabled it... yet their Pi-Hole shows it still pinging every 5 minutes.

The only way to kill it is to disable the network totally.

What I've moved to instead:

• Nvidia Shield (vanilla Android TV)
  
• Hauppage WinTV DVB dual tuner
  
• Plex
  
  

And yeah I still have Netflix, Mubi, BBC iPlayer available... but now I watch TV via Plex, and this has become my Plex server.

My Sony TV has been reduced to a factory reset dumb panel, and I'm really glad. Samba.tv is pretty much the worse thing I've ever seen in terms of privacy. It's full big brother straight out of 1984 level.