Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Chromecast (the device) is dead, what can I use now? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Armand1@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I've had a Chromecast for almost a decade, and it had mostly been great. They cost £30 at the time, and let you cast from most media apps, even if they didn't really have their own UI. You could take it to a friends house / hotel, power it off of the USB port on the back of most TVs and you'd be off to the races.

Given that they are now discontinued and my old one doesn't support 4K and casting from some newer apps (maybe a lack of AV1 / h265 support?), I'm looking for a replacement.

I'm looking for a privacy-respecting device in a vaguely stick-like format that will support casting from Android. It having support for apps is a nice to have for me.

Before you say "well if you use YouTube / Plex it's not private because they collect data about what you watch", sure, that may be true, but I'd rather not have the stick itself also do ACR on everything I cast as well.

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

very little base level telemetry

tcpdump on an appletv I did in 2024 disagrees. I can't imagine it's any better today.

[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And what did your tcpdump reveal?

LG levels of bullshittery? Or Sony style fingerprinting of anything on the screen?

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Connections to apple streaming source CIDR blocks, connections to apple auth CIDR blocks, and a bunch of ips in apple blocks I have no idea what they do.

Apple domains are easy to identify. https://support.apple.com/en-us/101555

A lot of it associated with iTunes and apple store stuff like mzstatic.com but also https connections to unknown domains. It's almost all https, so impossible to say what's being sent.

The content streams are easy to pick out, because only a handful of stateful sessions go to known CDNs.

Why starting a movie or show on an apple TV requires a check to siri and search is probably explainable, but certainly 1400 requests during movie play to diagassets.apple.com (the "diagnostics" domain known to be a black hole of Apple mystery) is probably reporting data of some kind.

It goes on like that, mysterious connections that occur during video play and at startup to domains like Apple Education raise a few eyebrows.

And then there are the plugins, which do a lot of phoning home.