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Five minutes, no hardware, no terminal. Three switches in your TV’s own menus stop most of what you read about. Do them in this order.

You need the TV, its remote, and nothing else. Every step here is reversible, and none of it voids a warranty or changes anything you cannot change back the same way you changed it.

Step 1. Turn off content recognition

Content recognition means the TV samples the picture on screen, every fraction of a second, and sends those samples to a server that identifies what you are watching. It runs on whatever is on the screen, including a games console or a laptop plugged into an HDMI port.

Find the switch on your vendor’s page. It is usually not called “content recognition”, which is why people miss it.

A Roku player, the stick or box rather than a Roku-branded television, has no Smart TV Experience setting, because it has no TV inputs to watch.

This actually works

A 2024 peer-reviewed study measured Samsung and LG televisions before and after using these switches. After opting out, the researchers found a complete absence of traffic to every content recognition domain they had identified, and no new domains appeared to replace them (Anselmi et al., IMC 2024; code and data at SafeNetIoT/ACR).

The switch is not decoration. The vendor honours it. That is the single most encouraging finding in this whole project, and it is why Step 1 comes before anything involving your router.

On a Vizio set the switch exists because a regulator forced it. The FTC’s 2017 order requires Vizio to get affirmative express consent before collecting viewing data (press release). Turning Viewing Data off is a right you were given, not a hack.

Step 2. Turn off ad personalisation

This is a different setting in a different menu, and turning off content recognition does not turn it off. On most platforms it sits near a “reset advertising ID” button, which is worth pressing at the same time. Resetting the ID breaks the link between everything collected so far and everything collected from now on.

Your vendor page lists the exact path. On LG look for Limit Ad Tracking. On Samsung, Interest-Based Advertisements sits on the same screen as Viewing Information Services. On Roku it is Limit ad tracking, or Personalize ads on newer builds. On Fire TV it is Interest-based Ads.

Step 3. Two or three more switches, while you are in there

The microphone. Every platform with voice control has a switch for it. LG puts voice recognition under General > AI Service. Samsung has Voice Recognition Services on the privacy screen. Roku has Channel microphone access under Privacy > Microphone. If you use the remote’s voice button, leaving it on is a real trade, so make it deliberately.

Let the TV stop talking to your phone. If you never control the TV from a phone app, turn that off. On a Roku, it is “Control by mobile apps”, and from Roku OS 14.1 it gates most control commands. On an LG, the equivalent switch closes a network listener on ports 3000 and 3001, which is the same service that four 2023 Bitdefender vulnerabilities were chained through, with over 91,000 devices found exposing it to the open internet (writeup). Your LG page has the exact toggle.

If you own a Hisense, do not use the TV’s web browser. Security researchers found the browser can be made to install an application with no notification to you, and to read files off the set, including the Wi-Fi configuration (bananamafia.dev). Use a phone, a laptop, or anything else.

Every path on the vendor pages is marked either verified on real hardware or needs-confirmation. Most privacy paths are currently needs-confirmation, because several vendors’ own privacy pages returned errors or could not be read when we checked them. If a path is wrong on your model, telling us is a two-minute fix for everyone with that model.

Do you need to do anything at the router?

Steps 1 to 3 are the most effective five minutes available to you, and for many people that is enough. Here is the honest limit.

A peer-reviewed measurement across more than 200 homes found that 68% of smart TVs ignore the DNS server their router hands them and talk to Google’s resolver directly (Mazhar and Shafiq, IoTDI 2020). A television that ignores your router’s instructions is also a television whose behaviour you cannot see and cannot change from the sofa.

So the two halves of this do different jobs, and neither one replaces the other:

• The switches on the TV stop the collection at the source, for the things the vendor has agreed to let you stop. Content recognition is one of those things, and the study above shows it stops completely.
• Filtering at the router covers everything else the TV contacts, covers every other device in the house, and shows you what is actually happening rather than what the menu claims.

The router step takes about thirty minutes and does not touch the TV at all. If you have a Roku, or a Chromecast made before Google TV, it is the only step available to you, because neither device has a DNS setting anywhere in its menus.

What to do next

1. If you stopped at Step 3, you are done for today. Put a note in your calendar to re-check the switches after the next firmware update, and tell us what you find. Whether updates quietly turn content recognition back on is an open question nobody has measured, and it is one of the things this project is trying to answer.
2. If you want to see what your TV contacts, read Why do it at the router. It explains what filtering can and cannot reach before you spend any time on it.
3. If you already know you want to filter, go straight to Choose a resolver. The free, no-hardware, no-account option is the first one on that page.
4. If a menu path on your vendor page was wrong, or a setting had a different name on your model, open a bug report with the model number and firmware version. Corrections are the contribution we want most.

Found something wrong on your model? A corrected menu path is the most useful contribution this project gets.
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