I noticed something weird about a year ago that I couldn’t quite explain at first. I’d been watching this obscure cooking show on my laptop, nothing I’d searched for anywhere, just something a friend put on when she was over, and two days later my Samsung TV’s home screen was suggesting three different cooking shows in that exact same genre, right there under “Recommended for You.” I remember standing in my living room with a bag of chips, staring at the screen, genuinely a little unsettled, thinking, how does it even know that. My TV wasn’t even on when I watched that show. It took me way longer than I’d like to admit to connect the dots and realize my television had basically been watching me watch things.

The part that annoyed me most, honestly, wasn’t even the tracking itself, it was realizing I’d probably agreed to it. When I first set up the TV, years ago now, there was some onboarding screen asking about “personalized viewing experiences” or something equally vague and harmless-sounding, and I clicked through it the way you click through basically every terms and conditions screen in your life, without reading a word. I don’t think that’s a personal failing, to be clear, I think that’s by design. Nobody sits down and reads a privacy notice on their TV remote at 11pm while trying to just watch a movie.

So I went digging into the settings, and it genuinely took me embarrassingly long to find the actual toggle. It wasn’t under anything labeled “Privacy” the way you’d expect, or at least not obviously. On my Samsung it was buried under General and Privacy, then Terms and Privacy, then something called Viewing Information Services, which is apparently just corporate speak for “the thing that watches what you watch.” I turned it off, and honestly felt a small, slightly ridiculous sense of victory when I did, like I’d won some tiny unglamorous battle nobody else would ever know about.

If you’ve got an LG instead, it’s not called the same thing at all, which I only found out later when my mom asked me to help with hers and I confidently marched into her settings menu looking for “Viewing Information Services” like an idiot and found nothing. LG calls their version Live Plus, and it’s tucked away even deeper, somewhere under general settings and then additional settings. It’s like every brand agreed to make this as inconsistent as possible on purpose, so that any guide you find only half applies to your actual TV.

What really got under my skin, though, was realizing that turning the setting off doesn’t necessarily mean it stays off. Software updates can apparently reset these preferences without telling you, quietly re-enabling stuff you’d already turned off, which feels almost deliberately exhausting. I’ve started checking that setting every couple of months now, sort of like checking the batteries in a smoke detector, except way more annoying and with no chirping sound to remind me.

Eventually I did something a friend who works in IT suggested, half as a joke, which was to just stop letting the TV connect to the internet at all. I use a streaming stick plugged into the HDMI port for basically everything anyway, so the smart features on the TV itself were kind of pointless for me to begin with. I went into the Wi-Fi settings and just forgot the network, and that was it. No internet connection means the TV physically can’t send those little fingerprints anywhere, since there’s nowhere for them to go. It felt oddly satisfying, almost stubborn in a way I liked, disconnecting a $700 television from the internet on purpose after spending money specifically for the “smart” features I now actively didn’t want.

I’ll admit there’s a small inconvenience to it. I lost some of the app shortcuts I occasionally used directly on the TV, and every so often I forget and try to open something on the TV’s own interface before remembering, oh right, this thing is basically just a monitor now. But honestly, that trade-off feels completely worth it to me. I don’t need my television guessing what I might like based on cooking shows my friend put on while visiting, or worse, based on whatever’s happening on my work laptop when it’s plugged in nearby.

If there’s one thing I’d tell someone who hasn’t thought about any of this before, it’s that the setting almost certainly exists on your TV whether you’ve noticed it or not, it’s just usually buried somewhere unhelpful and named something deliberately boring so you’ll scroll right past it. It took me maybe fifteen minutes total to find and disable mine, including the ten minutes I spent getting mildly frustrated clicking through menus that led nowhere. That’s a pretty small amount of time for the strange, small comfort of knowing my TV isn’t quietly cataloguing my Tuesday nights and selling the highlights to whoever’s buying.

Disclaimer:
This post is based on my personal experience and settings I found on my own Samsung and LG TVs steps, menu names, and locations may vary depending on your TV’s brand, model, and current software version. I’m not affiliated with Samsung, LG, or any other TV manufacturer mentioned here. This isn’t professional, legal, or technical advice it’s just what worked for me. Always check your own device’s official support page for the most accurate and up to date instructions before making changes to your privacy settings.