Haha yeah, I agree.
It's a Toshiba 65C350 Fire TV.
I considered returning it but I'm used to tinkering with stuff so I just dealt with it. I won't do that again though lol. Was not one of the more fun things to mess with.
It'd be nice if I could flash it completely to remove all their junk. I mean, the device is running Android of some sort so it's possible but I'm not that invested in trying to figure that out.
Some TVs do not give you that option though. Shield or not, I have one that will straight up block 90% of the screen every 10 minutes if it doesn't have a connection.
I would toss it, but it was 250$ and 65" with a decent display. So I used ssh to get into it and install a firewall to block 90% of the TV from access, including the update service. Also have filtering through my network firewall for ad servers, update servers etc.
So now the scan for a connection works, but they aren't getting much of anything in terms of metrics or telemetry or other information from the TV. I also disabled the default launcher and installed a different one on it as well as jellyfin.
I will never buy another TV like that though, it was an absolute pain to get it working. It should be illegal to hinder usage of a TV just because they are being blocked from invading your privacy.
Yeah, I did look a little bit and saw that.
If I recall correctly the TV is kind of in this in between update where I was able to get into it and lock it down the way that I want but I can't get it to give me root access. From what I remember I shouldn't have even been able to get into it at all but was still able to.
Fun stuff.
I'll look into it again though since it's been about a year. Maybe there is something new.