Don't waste time trying to block Fire TV ads—Amazon has already won
The Amazon Fire TV series of sticks and (literal) televisions has been popular for years thanks to low price points for decent-quality hardware.
However, Fire TVs cost so little because they are at least partly a subsidized ad-delivery system. It's part of the price you pay to not pay the price, so to speak. Naturally, people have used all sorts of methods to block ads and prevent tracking on Fire TVs, but in the end, the way these devices are set up makes this a futile game to play.
Fire TV's privacy settings don't actually stop the ads or tracking
The buttons, they do nothing!
My colleague Rich Hein wrote an excellent guide on how to stop your Fire TV from collecting personal information on you. In it, he shows the settings you need to change to disable tracking by Amazon, and you can also turn off personalized ads.
Note that you can't turn off ads; all it does is remove the personalization, which means the ads you see may or may not be relevant to you.
According to Amazon's developer guidelines , app makers can still use contextual advertising, which isn't affected by your opt-out decision and doesn't rely on your unique advertising ID. Apps are allowed to use alternative identifiers as a fallback, as long as they are in line with Amazon's privacy policy.
In 2019, a study titled Watching You Watch: The Tracking Ecosystem of Over-the-Top
TV Streaming Devicesfound that (and I'm paraphrasing) disabling interest-based ads reduced the number transmitting the advertising ID from 35 to 16, but tracker domains fell only from 119 to 115. Apps continued transmitting Android IDs, serial numbers, and MAC addresses.
This is an old study, of course, and things might have changed in practice, but it's a good example of how that "opt-out" you're given is more of a pacifier than any sort of effective mitigation of ads and tracking.
Pi-hole can only block the domains it can identify
You must know its true name to hold power over it
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
We've written quite a bit about Pi-hole , and it's probably the most popular self-hosted ad-blocking solution. By using Pi-hole as your DNS server, you can block ads before they ever reach any of your devices, and overall it's pretty effective. However, Pi-hole alone won't stop the tracking you think it does .
That's because Pi-hole works by managing which domains your network devices can reach. If an ad network's domain isn't on the Pi-hole's block list, it will work as normal. It also doesn't know anything about the content of the data your devices are sending. So a device could be sending thousands of bits of telemetry every day to a home server, and your self-hosted DNS won't know if it should even do something about it, because that's not how it was designed to work.
The bottom line is that if ads are being served through a domain not on the Pi-hole (or whatever DNS-based solution you use) block list, or if the same domain for desired content is also being used to serve ads, then you're going to see those ads, and tracking is still technically possible.
Amazon can hide unwanted traffic among the traffic Fire TV needs
Sneaky, sneaky!
Amazon via StreamTV Insider
Because Amazon controls the cloud infrastructure, your Fire TV's OS, its hardware, and all the first-party services on your device, it can easily bypass your attempts to block ads and tracking. It's basically impossible to know what traffic from your Fire TV is something you want (e.g., pulling show metadata) versus something you don't want (e.g., how you like to watch The Princess Bride at 3 a.m.).
It's important that I point out any platform owner can do this. Apple could do it if it liked, but as far as we know, Apple's privacy policy and stance towards tracking and advertising are much more consumer-friendly. At least for now.
You can lock down a Fire TV, but eventually it stops being useful
If you're going to stick with a Fire TV, you can lock it down to some extent and prevent some degree of tracking and advertising. If you want to get rid of it all, you're going to run into issues. Since tracking and ads can be mixed in with normal legitimate traffic, your device needs to work; at some point you're just turning your Fire TV into a paperweight.
If you can't live with that, the best advice I can offer is switching to a different device. A Google TV device gives you more options to stop tracking , at least. As Ars Technica notes, common advice among privacy advocates is to use an Apple TV and disconnect your smart TV or stop using Google, Roku, or Fire TV devices.
Apple TV devices do not display ads in the same way as these other devices, and privacy defaults and controls are much stronger. I'd never claim it was perfect, but spending that $100 upfront will save you many headaches and annoyance. Besides, it will be a decade before you need to replace it, if you buy the latest model.
