[ghostly_s]

These are not "streaming boxes" in the sense you are talking about. Their appeal is that they come preloaded with chinese pirate streaming apps. Traditional streaming boxes - Apple TV, Fire stick, Roku - are not affected by this, though if you want privacy-focused Apple TV is the only remaining contender, and with Apple's continued descent into advertising vendor I'd guess that one is not long for this world, either.

[giantg2]

My understanding is that Roku bypasses DNS blocking with hardcoded tables so it can report back on various data they track on you.

[autoexec]

Roku collects an insane amount of data on users. Basically everything that they can get their hands on

> Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching. https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...

[timbit42]

Can you monitor its traffic and block by IP?

[mikestew]

I’m sure you could. At what point do you just rip out the thing that is trying so hard to work around your control of your network? An Apple TV doesn’t cost that much.

[kube-system]

The door is slowly closing on all of these blocking schemes by moving ad content to the same domains as the primary content.

This is already a common feature for analytics toolkits.

[giantg2]

I probably could, but haven't done so yet.