Better still, use Kodi or Jellyfin on whatever you have lying around - Kodi works fine on a Raspberry Pi 3 - so you're not swapping one spy for the other.
What do you base your trust in Apple on? I don't trust them any more than I trust Google or Microsoft or Amazon or whatever other data-hungry corporate entity you may think of.
For AppleTV the hardware is far more expensive than the alternatives because it’s not subsidized by selling your viewing habits. The privacy policies tell you this, as does public knowledge. Companies like Roku which make most of their money on analyzing and selling your data do so publicly because they want people to know they should buy this info from them. Apple as a whole has had its traffic analyzed across devices by many many many security researchers; if there was a great contradiction in terms it would be public info by now.
But most importantly I work at Apple and see how the sausage is made — privacy is integrated into every step of the process. Working in AI this is quite difficult because it means I don’t have user data to work with unlike if I worked at some other bigcos. It’s funny to me when I interview people coming from such companies, it never really clicks until they ask how many GPUs I have access to and I reply “where all this data is coming that you want to process?”
I think it’s easy to become jaded, but when it’s based on assumptions then you don’t know the delta between it and reality. Overall I suspect the true distribution of corruption/valid concerns across society overlaps little with public beliefs… I believe most of the shady stuff is happening outside of the public eye and we don’t even know it exists.
You work at Apple and you think Apple is trustworthy. I'm fairly sure people who work at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and the others say the same about their employers. The mere fact that Apple products are expensive does not make Apple trustworthy, it just means they target the 'premium' market segment. Here's some food for thought for those who put too much trust in Apple:
There's more to be found on this subject, just feed a search engine with questions related to apple tracking and gathering data on its users.
Please note that '...but they are not as bad as Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Facebook/etc' does not exculpate Apple. They may well be but that is not what I compare them to. I compare them to that Google-free device running an AOSP-derived distribution connecting to the server-under-the-stairs, not to any other corporate entity. In that comparison they fail spectacularly, hence my preference for running free software.
