How to Protect Your Smart TV from Ads and Tracking

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You paid hundreds — maybe thousands — of dollars for your smart TV. And yet, it shows you ads. On the home screen. In the app launcher. Inside free apps. Between episodes. Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and even Sony and Vizio all monetize your attention after you have already bought the hardware.

Worse, your smart TV is watching you back. Most modern TVs use a technology called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) that takes periodic screenshots of what you are watching and sends them to advertising servers. This data is used to build a profile of your viewing habits and serve you targeted ads — not just on the TV, but across all your devices.

You cannot install an ad blocker on a smart TV. There is no browser extension, no app, no root access. But there is DNS filtering.

What Your Smart TV Sends Home

A smart TV connected to your network makes dozens of background connections that have nothing to do with streaming your content. These fall into three categories:

Ad servers. Your TV fetches ads from advertising networks to display on the home screen, in the electronic program guide, and inside free apps. Samsung's ads come from ads.samsung.com and related domains. Roku fetches from logs.roku.com and various ad exchanges.
ACR tracking. Automatic Content Recognition captures what you are watching — whether it is cable TV, a Blu-ray, a game console, or a streaming service — and reports it to analytics servers. Samsung calls it "Viewing Information Services," LG calls it "Live Plus," and Vizio was fined $2.2 million by the FTC for doing it without consent.
Telemetry. Usage statistics, crash reports, app launch data, button presses, search queries — all sent to the manufacturer's servers. This data feeds recommendation algorithms and is often shared with third-party advertising partners.

Did you know? A 2020 study by Northeastern University and Imperial College London found that smart TVs contact tracking servers even when idle. Some models made connections to advertising endpoints within seconds of being turned on, before any app was launched.

Why DNS Filtering Is the Solution

Every connection your smart TV makes starts with a DNS lookup. When Samsung's ad SDK wants to fetch an ad, it first asks DNS to resolve ads.samsung.com to an IP address. DNS filtering intercepts this lookup and returns a block response. The ad SDK gets no IP address, so it cannot fetch the ad. The ad slot stays empty or shows nothing.

The same applies to ACR tracking domains, telemetry endpoints, and any other unwanted connection. If the domain is on a blocklist, the connection never happens.

This works on every smart TV brand because all of them use DNS. There is nothing to install on the TV itself — the filtering happens at the network level, either on your router or through a DNS service.

What Gets Blocked

With a DNS filtering service like UnveilDNS and the right blocklists enabled, here is what stops working on your smart TV:

Category	Examples	Effect
Home screen ads	Samsung ads, Roku sponsored tiles, Fire TV banner ads	Ads disappear or show blank
ACR tracking	Samsung Viewing Info, LG Live Plus, Vizio Inscape	No viewing data leaves your network
OS telemetry	Usage stats, crash reports, device fingerprinting	Background phone-home connections blocked
Third-party trackers	Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, ad exchanges	Cross-device tracking disrupted

Streaming apps themselves (Netflix, Disney+, YouTube) continue to work normally. DNS filtering targets the advertising and tracking infrastructure, not the content delivery servers. You may still see some in-app ads in free apps that serve ads from their own content domain, but the majority of tracking and advertising traffic is eliminated.

How to Set It Up

The most effective approach is to configure DNS filtering at your router, which protects all devices on the network including smart TVs:

Create an UnveilDNS account and set up a profile with the Security or Family preset. These presets include blocklists that cover major advertising and tracking domains.
Enable the telemetry blocking toggle in Settings. This specifically targets OS-level telemetry from Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and smart TV platforms.
Change your router's DNS settings to the UnveilDNS IP addresses. This ensures all devices on your network — including smart TVs that you cannot configure individually — use filtered DNS.

If you cannot change your router's DNS (some ISP-provided routers lock this setting), you can configure DNS directly on some smart TVs:

Samsung: Settings > General > Network > Network Status > IP Settings > DNS Setting > Enter Manually
LG: Settings > Network > Wi-Fi > Advanced Settings > Edit > Set DNS Manually
Fire TV: Settings > Network > Select your network > Advanced > Change DNS
Android TV / Google TV: Settings > Network > Your connection > IP Settings > Static > DNS

Router-level is better: Configuring DNS at the router protects every device automatically, including IoT devices, game consoles, and smart speakers that have no DNS configuration options at all.

Beyond Ads: The Privacy Benefit

Blocking ads on a smart TV is satisfying, but the real value is privacy. ACR tracking is one of the most invasive data collection mechanisms in consumer electronics. It knows what you watch, when you watch it, and for how long — across all input sources, not just streaming apps.

This data is sold to advertisers, data brokers, and measurement companies. By blocking ACR domains at the DNS level, you cut off this data pipeline at the source. Your viewing habits stay in your living room.

Stop Your Smart TV from Tracking You

Block ads, ACR tracking, and telemetry on every smart TV in your home. No software to install — just change your DNS.

Get Started Free

Will It Break Anything?

In most cases, no. Streaming apps (Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, YouTube) work fine because their content is served from different domains than their ads and tracking. The TV's core functionality — browsing apps, streaming video, casting from your phone — is unaffected.

Occasionally, a TV might show a brief delay when loading the home screen as it waits for an ad response that never comes. Some Samsung TVs show a small blank rectangle where a sponsored tile used to be. These are cosmetic and do not affect usability.

If you ever notice an issue with a specific app, you can add its domain to your allowlist in the UnveilDNS dashboard and it will work immediately.