I just got a smart TV (android based), and going through the install process discovered that if you connect it to Internet it transmits a truly astonishing amount of data to a company based in Ireland, which is in turn a subsidiary of another company in Turkey. Neither of which I have previously heard of. I didn't particularly want the smarts, but there don't seem to be any dumb ones available any more, and our old one had expired in its sleep so we had to get something.
There is basically nothing you do on this box that is not logged, if you have connected it. Heaven knows what they do with it when they have it. You watch Eurovision, and turn to another channel after 15 minutes, its logged to your particular box and IP address and hardware. Probably every commercial where you turn the sound down is logged (that's just my guess, I don't know it for sure).
So I haven't connected it to our router and am using it like a dumb TV. But my question is, is it possible to put this device and only this device through something like pi-hole and so isolate it from the LAN, and also block it from sending data to these companies? Because I would quite like to be able to watch youtube music on it, but not at the price of sending my musical tastes to Turkey in real time!
I see on Amazon that you can get fanless industrial mini-pcs for about 70.00. Or there are NUCs on ebay for around 50.00. The industrial ones have two network ports.
Would it be possible to get one of the industrial ones, connect one of the ports to the TV, the other to our router, and install pi-hole so as to put the TV into a LAN zone of its own, and also to use pi-hole to block any transmissions to the company?
I'm not clear how this would (or would not) work. Essentially, can you have the pi-hole box sit between the TV and the LAN so that the rest of the LAN is unreachable from it and it blocks unwanted calling hime? How should one handle addressing in this case?
If you think it would work, that would be enough to encourage me to have a go and try and stumble through it. Any hints most welcome! Or suggestions for how to get the same result in some other way.
Peter