![]() ![]() Luckily they were wrong, and within a few hours I had both a functional router and a Pi-hole ready for action. It turned out that my provider’s cheap router (which I’m planning on replacing) doesn’t like setting changes, and more than once it went non-responsive and showed a configuration of lights that internet forums informed me meant it was bricked and would need to be replaced. An added benefit for data geeks like me is that it logs all this data and displays it on a neat web interface that acts as a rough approximation of a record of all browsing activity on your home network – interesting for tinkering and analysis, although the data can be anonymised and turned down for the privacy-conscious among us. So the Pi-hole effectively prevents your computer from knowing where advertising servers are located, meaning banner ads and tracking scripts fail to load. If it checks out, the DNS request is passed to a DNS server on the internet for a response. If the domain is a match, the DNS request is blocked and never returned. Your router passes all DNS requests to the Pi-hole and it checks the domains against blacklists of advertising and malware domains. Pi-hole sits on your network and acts as the designated DNS server for all your devices. If the DNS server replies and tells your computer that example.xyz’s IP address is 1.2.3.4, your computer will then make a connection to 1.2.3.4 and ask for the data that makes up the web page you requested. So how exactly does this magic box work? Every time you try to connect to a website – let’s say you enter “example.xyz” in Firefox – your computer sends a domain name system (DNS) request asking a DNS server for the IP address corresponding to that domain. This can improve the user’s browsing privacy across all devices on the network – even within apps on smartphones and TVs – bolster network security by blocking potential callouts to malware command and control servers, and (in theory, at least) boost internet browsing speeds by saving endpoints the effort of downloading all those banner ads. So I set out to find a way to put an end to this behaviour… A black hole for advertisementsĮnter Pi-hole – an open-source software package designed to be installed on a Raspberry Pi that can be used to block connections to advertising domains. ![]() But the privacy policy concerned me, and however you look at it, retroactively embedding advertising into a product I paid hundreds of pounds for is not cool. Now I want to be completely clear that I cannot vouch for the source and I have absolutely no idea whether my TV was sending clips to Samsung (one of the most popular posts on this blog, in fact, was about eerily relevant adverts that are likely down to clever data science). If you enable Samsung’s Internet-Based Advertising service, your TV viewing history will be siphoned up and sent back to Samsung to be shared with third parties that pay Samsung to send advertising directly to your screen. It’s hard to imagine a deeper violation of privacy from a smart TV set than having a screenshot of what you’re watching be uploaded to the cloud for corporate advertising purposes… Samsung’s privacy policy reveals an unnerving reality: that Samsung Smart TVs are sending clips of whatever is playing on the television to be sent back to Samsung. I only reached the point of taking action a weeks later, when Reddit alerted me to a disturbing-sounding news story about Samsung Smart TVs: PlayStation ads do appear during breaks on prime time TV, after all, so it might not have been tailored at all. I didn’t think much of it at the time and so didn’t take a photo (the one above was taken a week or two later when the next banner appeared). There was never a banner there before (sigh), and how would Samsung know that I play video games? They had no way of knowing which consoles I owned. It was the night before Christmas – or at least some time in December – and I was browsing through the options on my Samsung Smart TV for something to watch when I noticed a Sony PlayStation advert on the main menu. Here’s how I installed Pi-hole on my home network to try to block requests from my Samsung Smart TV – and what the data it collected revealed… ![]() A restless mind, a new feature, and a concerning news story had me worried about privacy over Christmas.
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