Ah nice. You know Apple literally invented Bonjour and mDNS? They know what's on your network. The only difference is that we applaud them for it. Does the apple tv do acr? It has to, to do the first party "magic" it does. Again, we just applaud them for it because they "only use it for first party services." Why are you so offended that Apple is just another for profit megacorp.

> the OP carefully skimmed this part out

lol

>we're talking to a bunch of bots on here

Ah. Okay. In a different tenor of conversation I'd be happy to clarify but...not when I'm up against this.

> I've always seen Apple TV as the least-bad option compared to Roku

If this was your original statement, I think we all would be on your side - I even use an Apple TV 4k personally and love it. It definitely is the best in the market for what it does.

> it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data.

Instead, you framed it as the only privacy-friendly option and that is logically and factually incorrect.

I think it depends on what you prioritize. I have an Apple TV, but also LG and Samsung smart TVs as well as Google TV Streamer.

They come with different tradeoffs wrt price, A/V quality, user interface, privacy, etc.

For me, the #1 thing is A/V quality. I don’t care about price, but most people do.

I believe you could buy a random Android streaming box with an unlocked bootloader, and then install LineageOS on it. Not sure about the “streams from all the major services” part re: LineageOS, but last I heard it’s improving.

(There are also some boxes made specifically for this, usually sold as development platforms for STB products, marketed based on what SoC they contain. Though they’ll tend to be $200, while the random “finished product” streaming box will be more like $30. Both come with decent remotes.)

A billion dollar company's public statement defending itself of a crime it was accused of committing and is sued for, is the source of truth now and what it was actually accused of doing is considered speculation? Sure.

You did mention "monetizing everything you do (on your television)", my answer was for that part. Again, my question to you is - it's closed source, do you have proof they aren't actually doing it? Or are you going to wait for another half a decade for another lawsuit to find out?

My point is, it's a for-profit corporation. And a really efficient one. They don't care about anyone's privacy or anything else. Only profits. History has proof - battery gate, siri lawsuit, etc.

PRISM was FISA, and was overhyped. There's a known (and legal) procedure for law enforcement agencies to go to major tech companies with a warrant and say "We need all the information for the account holder of xyz@gmail.com, because they are the subject of an active investigation." There are some concerns about how FISA courts are just rubber-stamps and don't actually read or challenge the warrants for validity, but at least nominally, the procedure is above-board and legal.

The next Snowden disclosure (MUSCULAR) was significantly more concerning though. It was that the NSA was tapping the internal fiber of Big Tech companies. I was at Google when the Snowden disclosures broke, and read the SRE postmortem. They found 2 fiber cuts underneath the English Channel, an hour apart, lining up with the start of the program as disclosed by Snowden. My inference is that the NSA paid off MI6 to send a submarine commando team to cut and tap the fiber of an American company, without consent, and then all the data was shared through Five-Eyes reciprocal data sharing agreements. Google leadership was hopping mad after this, but it would've been impolitic to bring it to the public. They started encrypting all internal traffic soon after, assuming that their internal network was compromised by various nation-state actors, which had some unfortunate effects on their internal culture of openness.

> It's a major selling point, for one.

That's marketing. Do you always trust everything in marketing material?

Yes, they make great devices. I have many. But do we _know_ that what they claim is fact?

And I don't know what Google has to do with this.

You will never silence the paranoid lunatics who come out in droves whenever Apple is discussed.

The only standard they will accept is absolute perfection. It doesn’t matter all of the drastic steps they’ve taken to ensure that past mistakes are never made again or that their hands are tied when governments make demands of them in the future. It doesn’t matter that they’re demonstrably orders of magnitude better than everyone else.

Hopefully you do understand what "track record" means, especially when it isn't really a clean one.