Stop your television reporting what you watch

Most sets run something called automatic content recognition. The television takes regular snapshots of whatever is on screen — a streaming app, a console, a DVD, live television — works out what it is, and builds a picture of your household’s viewing. That picture is used to sell advertising, and often shared beyond the manufacturer.

It runs underneath the apps, so it does not matter what you are watching or where it came from. Buried opt-outs exist on some models and are easy to miss, easy to have reset by an update, and rarely complete. A television is also the one screen in the house where you cannot install an ad blocker — which is exactly why blocking it at the network is the practical answer.

This blocks the watching, not the manufacturer. Netflix still plays, the app store still loads, updates still arrive and the remote still works — because the television’s own address is deliberately left alone. That is the difference between this and the De-Google style lists, which cut a company off entirely.

What you will notice is a quieter home screen on sets that show banner ads, and a television that has stopped taking notes.

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.