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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • It’s not absurd at all. They know the IPs, they know those devices use the same network, and they also know where they are located pretty accurately: the Google Street View cars also scan for WiFi networks and map them to their location.

    2 devices consistently connected to the same router, to the same network, in the same place… must belong to the same person or to 2 people sharing a home. If cookies set by other websites and seen by Google show similar browsing habits, it’s probably the same person.















  • I’m not the person you replied to, but I think my experience could be relevant.

    I have a MiBox TV S 4K, which as far as I know runs pretty pure AndroidTV (but I might be wrong). This is still going to try to connect to Google and Xiaomi servers for tracking and ads… but I have set up a custom DNS blocking trackers and ads.

    I found this Reddit post and followed the instructions to change the DNS server on the MiBox to NextDNS, where I could later activate relevant blocklists (SmartTV, Xiaomi, Google). I also perform monitoring of the domains the MiBox connects to and have blocked a couple manually.

    Finally, for AndroidTV forget about NewPipe and use SmartTube. It’s the same idea, but optimised for the AndroidTV experience where you have a remote and not a touchscreen.





  • I have a setup which is not ideal, but I believe improves privacy while preserving convenience: I never connected my TV to the internet, and instead use a MiBox TV S 4K for all my streaming with custom DNS blocking trackers and ads.

    I guess there might be other Android TV boxes that allow you to change the DNS server. It might be worth checking a bit around if you decide to go down this route.

    In my case, I found this Reddit post and was able to change the DNS server on the MiBox to NextDNS, where I could later activate relevant blocklists (SmartTV, Xiaomi, Google). I also perform monitoring of the domains the MiBox connects to and have blocked a couple manually.

    This way I have an AndroidTV experience with the streaming services that I want, and with the domains I don’t want blocked.


  • I guess depending on size and colour rendition of displays it can be easier / harder, but overall I’d still say it’s a poor choice.

    A choice of different colours is OK, but specifically those 2 are pretty hard to distinguish. Simply changing one of them to black, which looks like no other colour used in the map, would be much better.

    I don’t think a gradient works for colouring a map like this: we can distinguish gradient colours when they are next to each other, but if 2 countries far away have adjacent values the colours would probably be too similar to tell the difference.