Every TV these days is a SmartTV, so much so, it is impossible to find a non-smart one like at all. And worth of all there is nothing smart about it. And only reason for smartness is telemetry and ads. And after reading how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched a series of lawsuits against Samsung and Co for spying at their customers, I got curious how noisy is my TV (Hisense 75U65QF).

Just to clarify, even tho I use AppleTV, my TV set is taking screenshots and sending them to its mothership, to know what I am watching? Huh?

Solution

Google led me to jnmobilesoft/hisense-u8n-pihole-blocklist, who already did a very good job at it. Tho he had a different model (unconsiquential in the big picture), but from a very different region of SAR.

After fork, and few days of updates to the list I got it to satisfying level of blocking (do not forget to block 8.8.8.8 as this DNS is hardcoded in TV itself it seems).

Now numbers. Drum roll please. In 24 hours this tv made… 6,988 requests to PiHole. Or about 1 query every 10 seconds.

If you are geografically adjusted to Texas, add this to your pihole TV group to try it out:

https://github.com/Vegasq/hisense-pihole-blocklist/blob/main/domains.txt

Give jnmobilesoft a like as well!

Cheers.