Stop your television reporting what you watch

Most manufacturers run some form of automatic content recognition. The set samples what is on screen — including material from a console, a streaming stick or an aerial — and matches it against a catalogue to build a viewing profile, which is then used for advertising and sold on.

It runs at the operating-system level, so it is unaffected by which app you are in, and there is often no complete opt-out in the settings. A television has no ad blocker, no extensions and no way to install anything, which is exactly the situation DNS filtering is built for.

This blocks telemetry and advertising hosts, not the vendor. Streaming apps still play, the store still loads, updates still arrive, and the remote still works. The bare domains — roku.com, samsung.com, lg.com — are deliberately not on the list, which is the difference between this and the De-Google style lists that block a vendor outright.

What you will notice is fewer banner ads on the home screen of sets that show them, and a television that stops building a profile of your viewing.

A television usually has no DNS setting worth using, so this is a case for the router: set the resolver there and every device on the network inherits it, the TV included. Some sets let you set DNS manually in the network settings, which works too.

The setup guide covers the router case, including UniFi, OPNsense, pfSense and OpenWrt. If you have Android phones from Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO, Realme or Vivo, the Mobile OEM Telemetry category does the same job for those.