Privacy
You may not have given this much thought, but most smart TV manufacturers aren’t nearly as big on privacy as Apple is. This means that there’s a good chance that your smart TV is spying on you, reporting all of your viewing habits back to the manufacturer’s mothership.
While some smart TVs allow you to turn this off, it’s almost always enabled by default, and the options to disable it aren’t always obvious. In fact, many of these TV makers are quite cheeky in their approach, requiring users to explicitly switch OFF settings like “Don’t Share My Personal Information,” and this makes it pretty hard to trust whether disabling these settings is truly enough to keep your viewing habits private.
While there’s obviously nothing you can do about sharing your viewing habits with the streaming services themselves — Disney+, Netflix, and even Apple TV+ are almost certainly keeping track of what you’re watching on each of their individual services — there’s absolutely no reason that a TV maker needs this information — other than selling it to marketing companies and advertisers, of course.
With Apple’s strong focus on privacy, you’re pretty much guaranteed that your Apple TV isn’t reporting anything at all outside of each individual app. After all, Netflix doesn’t need to know that you decided to stop in the middle of Outlander to go indulge in an old episode of Dawson’s Creek on Hulu.
In fact, since Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency feature works on tvOS 14.5 and later just like it does on your iPhone and iPad, you can feel even more confident that what you do on Netflix stays on Netflix.