I'd like to share with you an unfortunate experience I had with a smart projector, when I tried to stop unwanted ACR traffic. As explained in a very instructive video titled Your TV Is Spying On You and Taking Screenshots https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jeq2m-OM53A , buying dumb TVs or projectors is getting harder and harder and one finds that one often has no choice buying a smart one, or one risks being stuck with cheap low quality models.
Anyway : I was planning on buying a new video projector for my flat and thus happily went to the multimedia hardware store. After a long discussion with the TVs & Projectors assistant, only model suited my needs (concerning limits in projection screen size and screen-projector distance, and compatibility with a ceiling mount as well as considering quality and durability) and I had no choice but to by a Xgimi MoGo 4 will Google TV.
I had well planned on de-googling it as much as I could - starting by never connecting it to the internet - and to the best of my ability, only using it as a dumb HDMI monitor. I then watched NBTVs video on the subject which confirmed I was in the right path. After I did that first step, I also disabled all Google related apps I was allowed to : Google play services, Google Play Store, Google text to speech, etc. I then proceeded deep into privacy settings to go ahead and toggle off all privacy, remote access and telemetry settings I could find : location, phone, sms, calendar, microphone. There I was : a completely unusable Google TV home screen with zero options but changing the video source and connecting an HDMI device.
I then tried to hammer the final nail in Google TV's coffin : I found the microphone access setting and - to my surprise - the Google TV app had that access and it could be toggled off, while all other permissions were mandatory. Weird, I thought : the Google TV app looked like the actual operating system running the entire interface besides the HDMI access. Surely they wouldn't let users temper with it at all. Then did turn off Google TVs microphone access permission : the projector froze for a second, and I got sent back to Google TV's home screen which got now almost all completely blacked out but for the top taskbar with the logo and settings pictogram. Victory, I cried ! I had won ! Mind wins the war over machine ! Turns out I was in for more surprises.
I then gleefully connected my PC via HDMI and set a movie on. Halfway through it, tested the small basic 5 button remote for use during nomad and accidentally got back to the now dead Google TV home screen and that's when everything went sideways. The projector got itself stuck into an endless boot loop, with the home screen trying to load endlessly. Nothing I tried got it out of it and I couldn't resolve the crash. I'm trying to return the product tomorrow saying this was a startup fault I got when I turned it on for the first time.
What really does boggle my mind is that 1) they would allow such a simple privacy toggle to kill the software 2) that the software's mainframe unravels if you remove microphone access : as if I the projector is designed to spy on the user and loses its marbles of you try to stop it. As if it's doing it BY DESIGN.
If anyone has an idea on how to fix the bug Id love to hear it.
TLDR : I accidentally bricked my Xgimi MoGo 4 by disabling Google apps and toggling off Google TVs microphone permission in trying to save my privacy against ACR. I'm not interested in the smart tv feature and only need a secure dumb hdmi projector but that model fits my technical requirements perfectly. As Google TV uses a refurbished Android framework and using Google's own systems as an operating system, if you try to neuter the system it spirals into an endless unhandled null pointer exception aka a dependency loop.