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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Sad that Android TV boxes have better playback than PCs costing 20 times as much.
Android TV is not free though.
You pay with yourself,
your interests / watch habits,
all being collected and sold to the best bidder for "personalized ads"..
What about a raspberry pi with lineageos as a tv box?
It depends on what you'll run on it.
LineageOS in itself is good/private.
However the GApps/GMS are not.
I'd recommend replacing GMS with MicroG if you need that for the apps you use,
which still talks to Google,
but in a minimal way.
YouTube isn't private either,
but Grayjay/NewPipe are.
You can put LineageOS on some of the Amlogic boxes and just don't install Google apps and stick to FOSS.
Ofc the most private way to view content is to sail the high seas, though.
Good, I don't care about ads anyway, barely an inconvenience
Depends on the launcher you use.
That's... Not at all how it works.
Don't worry, you're one of today's lucky 10000!
Launcher on android is just that - an app to launch other apps. Other apps can and do run in the background, without ever being explicitly launched. Think play services, location provider, wifi connection manager, etc. Since google runs its stuff at the highest level - nothing can hide from it. Other apps, like netflix, utilise internal telemetry. Assholes like facebook push the boundaries to the limit and collect literally every input of every sensor to have as much data about your environment as possible.
TL;DR - custom launcher cool, but no cure.
Scary. Recommend any further reading?
Take a look for yourself with a rooted phone.
Blocker will show you all the recievers/services/activities/providers the app uses,
and will allow you to block them.
https://github.com/lihenggui/blocker
Apps often still work correctly with about 80-90% of their recievers/services/providers blocked, since they're spyware, which doesn't add functionality to the app.
XPrivacyLua will allow you to lie to apps when they request sensitive data.
Aditionally it will show you timestamps of what it lied about, to which apps, reveiling what they try to collect on you.
https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua
ClassyShark3xodus allows you to decompile and scan apps on the fly,
to check which well known trackers are embedded into it.
https://bitbucket.org/oF2pks/fdroid-classyshark3xodus
Idk if these apps still do it,
since I have not used them for years,
but that's how I learned about many things like:
I don't have something specific to read, my statement comes from questioning the declared permissions by apps. Why would, say, facebook - an app that, essentially, downloads and uploads content via http, need access to location, gyro, contacts, texts, call history, making calls, microphone, etc? Also, while I can't prove it, as someone who works in computing I can guarantee there are undocumented/buggy/testing APIs and just straight up bugs that companies with enough resources can and do find and abuse. Cambridge analytica has only strengthened my view on this.
Not a cure, but does stop me seeing ads. And frankly of you don't want anyone to know what you're watching, you wouldn't be on Netflix either.
But my point remains that Android TV is still a better legal media player than a PC.