I run a pi hole and use my laptop (Linux) connected to a projector. No hassle.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
53 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy Guides
18657 readers
128 users here now
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Terry warned us
Many smart TVs allow you to disagree to the privacy policy during setup, which allows you to use it as a "dumb TV" which doesn't connect to WiFi or have other apps installed. I know Sony TVs do this and I've heard others do the same.
Opnsense, pfsense, adguard home, pi-hole. Look into them, start caring about your privacy. Not because you have nothing to hide, but because one day your data might be used against you.
Does pi hole slow down games?
No, unless the game you're playing is trying to download ads then you might have some minor issues but it shouldn't effect online multiplayer.
What games are you playing that regularly send out lots of DNS requests to different domains?
I mainly play Final Fantasy XIV. I assume they don't hit up DNS, but they're not open source, so we can only hope they don't.
My (very basic) understanding of a pihole is that it calls out to an upstream DNS provider (such as the one you'd be using without a pihole) and caches everything it gets back, meaning that it's only making new requests when you're querying a domain it hasn't queried before. I can't think of any reason a game would need to constantly be accessing different domains (except maybe for some kind of server browser?)
Used one for about a year. No. I play stuff online alot, so its important to me. No slowdowns. It has nothing to do with your ping.
In fact, a good pihole will speed things up.
The worrying part:
Most TVs on the market today come with a technology called automatic content recognition (ACR) built in. This is basically Shazam for TV — Shazam itself helped popularize the tech — and gives smart TV platforms the ability to monitor what you’re watching by either taking screenshots or capturing audio snippets while you’re watching.
The author then just gives up and says "maybe targeted adverts aren't so bad", concluding that the only way to avoid them is to buy an older TV. Fuck that! Either never connect it to the internet and plug in a more trusted devices, or go for a deep dive down the pihole.
Honest question how do we stream from Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV, etc without connecting to the internet? Also, most of those stream require a recognized device to stream over 1080p. So basically, if you get a new TV wouldn't you be operating it as a old TV on those terms? The alternative that I see is keeping all that you want to watch at 4k in Jellyfin or Emby (don't use Plex it is just pushing ads) but you will need to maintain a library.
That's what I meant by "never connect it to the internet and plug in a more trusted device", whether that's a Chromecast or your PC you can always plug in something else you trust more than the TV. Obviously finding something you can trust that does everything you want is another story.
Yeah, I get it. Disconnecting the TV is a must, and luckily I never even connected mine for many years. The thing is that I'm not sure that we can trust in the licensed devices either. Chromecast, Fire TV, Nvidia, etc... All of them have trackers as well. A PC or a Pi would have the limitation of streaming at maximum 1080p resolution for some streamers providers such as Netflix. It is quite a challenge!
Lol. Well, that's most people's take on privacy. OMG they are taking our data and showing us ads that we hate. But I guess we can't do anything about it. Oh well.
I'm tryna change this and raise awareness about the importance of privacy through this open source project called idcaboutprivacy.
We need to have a community wiki with TVs where the WiFi chip can be reliably desoldered
I just use my appleTV 4K with my samsung tv disconnected from the internet
So, how's that in the privacy aspect?
Better than most alternatives I guess, or even stock tv
A simple first step to helping oneself learn better ways to deal with this problem is to setup NextDNS on your router and use their Roku or similar content filters.