Technology

Look into Sceptre. 4K with no OS, no ads, doesn't ask for WiFi - just a TV.

It’s hard but not impossible, as even ‘retail displays’ run an OS in the background to control input switching, image settings etc.

Honestly the best thing to do is buy whatever TV you want (we have a couple of the LG OLEDs in our household), and don’t ever plug them into your network (or WiFi). Otherwise, with updates OS and apps become sluggish, with more ads crammed in.

Instead, use a seperate media player (e.g. Apple TV if you’re already on the iOS ecosystem, Nvidia Shield or similar for Android, HTPC if you’re so inclined etc.) - they’re more powerful, arguably more secure & private, and portable between displays if/when you upgrade.

I just give smartTVs no network at all

Block all port 53 traffic from your network outside of your DNS server/pihole itself.
Block all known DoH servers.

If you want to get REALLY fancy you can write a NAT rule that will force any outgoing request on port 53 to route to your dns/pihole.

I do all of this. It's actually funny to see the requests that were hardcoded to go somewhere. Giant fuck you to those companies.

What a shower of twats. Don't block the request in that case, just redirect it to your local server that returns a 1x1 transparent png for all requests.

Depending on your router you can forward all request on port 53 to your DNS server regardless of the IP they try to use.

I always have issues with dns blocking so I tried something sneaky I redirected all DNS requests to 1.1.1.1/1.0.0.1 and it worked brilliantly, for about a month when it stopped working all together, I don’t know if a cache was wiped or google saw what I was doing and made a special exception just for me, obviously I want to believe I’m a special snowflake taking the world’s largest internet company head on in an epic battle of wits and skill but I think the cache thing might be more likely for some reason.

Dang, so you'd have to block Google's DNS at the router level too?

Up until that TV dies.

I suspect in the near future it will be impossible to buy a TV without spyware/adware. The only option will be to not connect it to the internet and run your own Raspberry PI/SBC based solution.

Getting increasingly hard.

I finally learned why those 50" tvs are so cheap, like $200. Buy a dumb TV that's the same size is easily 5x the price.

Then again, nobody needs a TV and I only bought one during the pandemic, then connected it to my pi hole.

unfortunately,
on some markets they are gone.
"Smart" TVs have squeezed them out.

What about just not connecting it to the network? Then put a video device on it like Roku or Apple tv or whatever.