Hacking Your Smart Home: A Netrunner’s Guide to Reclaiming Your Domain

Severing the Corporate Uplink

First mission: kill Automatic Content Recognition. This insidious tech fingerprints everything flickering across your screen: streaming, broadcasts, even physical media. Samsung’s data harvesters hide under Settings, Support, Terms & Policies. Disable “Viewing Information Services,” and watch the telemetry stream die. Corpo’s spyware lurks in General, System, Additional Settings—so flatline that “Live Plus” or whatever they call their surveillance garbage. Hunt them down. Disable everything: viewing data, personalized ads, interest-based targeting. Salt the damn earth.

Deploying Your Network-Level Firewall

Enter Pi-hole: your personal black ICE running on a Raspberry Pi, or any old device you have; I prefer containers in a docker swarm. This beauty intercepts DNS requests at the network perimeter, strangling corporate surveillance before it leaves your subnet. Flash the Pi-hole image, configure your router to route all DNS through it, then load up those sweet blocklists targeting smart TV telemetry.

The corpos watch their tracking packets hit your Pi-hole and die screaming. Your dashboard fills with thousands of blocked connection attempts, digital proof of how desperately they want your data. Your TV might throw error messages like a wounded animal. Ignore them. You’re winning.

Home Assistant: Your Personal AI Fortress

Home Assistant transforms you from consumer to controller. This open-source platform gives you local command over smart devices without touching corporate cloud servers. Integrate your TV using HDMI-CEC or local network APIs—no internet required.

Code automations that sever your TV’s network access when you’re not actively streaming. Set up VLANs isolating smart devices in their own DMZ, preventing lateral movement across your network. Let Home Assistant detect trusted local streaming sources and dynamically manage internet access. Your home becomes a fortress with you at the command console.

The Air-Gap Option

Maximum security protocol: Never connect your smart TV to the net. Use external devices such as Apple TV or NVIDIA Shield. They offer superior privacy controls and run through your hardened Pi-hole network. Your TV becomes a dumb terminal. Just a display. No uplink, no telemetry, no corporate overwatch. Support will likely be ended for that “smart TV” in 5 years anyways.

Firmware updates are double-edged blades. They patch vulnerabilities but inject fresh tracking routines. Monitor privacy forums for intelligence before updating. Sometimes the smartest play is staying offline on isolated devices.

Operational Security

Your home is your sanctuary in this neon-drenched surveillance dystopia. The megacorps want to turn it into a panopticon. Every device is a potential backdoor, every microphone a listening post, every camera an eye in their network… Even your lightbulbs.

You have the tools. Pi-hole cuts off their data feeds. Home Assistant puts you in the command seat. Air-gapping removes their access entirely. Choose your security and privacy posture based on your threat model, but never trust a smart device to act in your interest.

The corps built this system because we let them. Because it was convenient. Because we didn’t think about the cost. Now you know better. Now you fight back. Welcome to the resistance, netrunner. Your home is your castle. Defend it.