If you have one of Amazon's smart devices to convert any television into a Smart TV, you will know perfectly well everything it can provide us. But, on some occasion, you will have come face to face with some uncomfortable publicity. Or you may wonder What kind of information does Amazon store? about you through this accessory. In this article we will deal with all this and, in addition, we will explain how you can remove ads from your amazon fire tv.
What information does Amazon store?
If you are one of those people who cares about their privacy and about the information that different services collect about us, this is the question that will matter most to you in all of this. Amazon has become a place where we carry out many actions of our day to day: purchases, listening to music, information searches, questions to the assistant and a long etcetera. Therefore, in addition to many other data from different channels, this platform stores the following information from your smart devices like Fire TV:
- Voice recordings from Alexa.
- Searches.
- Location information.
- Information contributed to the Skills.
- Application usage data.
- Use of the devices linked to our account.
All this is stored on their servers to, as they themselves explain, improve the user experience and show us ads based on our interest. If this does not bother you too much, it is best to leave all the settings that we will mention below because it is still true that the user experience improves. But, if you think otherwise, now we explain step by step what you must do so that Amazon stops collecting this information and ends interest-based ads.
Change Alexa's privacy settings
First of all, we will start with the information that is collected through the Alexa voice assistant. As you already know, these equipment for your television include the possibility of interacting with it to request certain information or ask it to do some actions. To access this control panel:
- Enter your platform content and device management from your computer and log in with your Amazon account.
- Once here, click on the "Privacy Settings" option in the top bar.
- Now you will see two different options. Click on the “Manage settings” button that you will find under the Alexa Privacy options.
At that moment you will arrive at the menu that you can see in the image that heads this section. Different panels are shown here with different information dedicated to each one. Each of these represents a certain information that Amazon collects through the use of its assistant. By clicking on the lower arrow of each of them you will access all the options dedicated to that section and, there, is where you must decide whether or not you want Amazon to store that data.
The one that seems most interesting to us is the third menu, where you can configure the permissions that Skills have installed on your computers and the information to which they have access.
Adjust device privacy
Given the information that this platform stores about us from Alexa, it is time to deal with the issue of ads and other data of interest.
Following the same access to the Privacy Settings panel that we saw in the previous section, we can reach the "Device Privacy". Here we can see all the smart TV equipment connected to our Amazon account and, if we click on any of these, we can see several important settings:
- Device usage data: Amazon collects information about how we use our equipment to improve the user experience globally and also create personalized promotions that are relevant to us.
- Interest-Based Ads: The applications that we install on these computers will use our advertising ID to create advertising profiles and show us ads based on our interests.
- Collect app usage data: The Fire TV app store collects information about the frequency and duration of how we use downloaded apps to improve how well they work and the quality of available apps.
Each of these options has a small "Disable" button at the bottom which, when clicked, will explain in detail what functionality this section represents and what will happen if you deactivate it.
We recommend that, if you want stop receiving ads for things you search for, turn off the "Interest-Based Ads" option. However, the "Device usage data" option is very interesting that we all have it active so that the overall experience is improved.
How to Block Ads
Another option to avoid annoying ads on your Fire TV Stick is to replace the default launcher, that is, the system layer created by Amazon that shapes this Android TV. This process is becoming more and more complicated —hence, it is more interesting that you follow the steps that we have explained to you a few paragraphs ago—, because Amazon is doing everything possible to avoid jailbreaking its devices. After all, advertising is part of your business, and if Fire TVs are so attractively priced, it's precisely because they guarantee that we'll be seeing ads throughout the life of the device.
Los followed What you have to do are the following:
- Go to the app store of your Fire TV Stick and download the app Downloader.
- Now, exit the store and go to Settings. Within Privacy, activate the developer options and the installation of third-party applications. Now, you will be able to install Android APK files from outside of the Amazon app store.
- Open Downloader and type in your browser Apptoid. Download the APK and install it.
- With Apptoide installed on your device, you can now install any app that is not within the official Fire TV Stick store. You can search any launcher and install it. The most used for Amazon dongle is Wolf Laucher, although there are many more that you can try if you want.
- Install the launcher, set it as default, and you're done. Now, you will no longer have annoying ads in the main menu of your Fire TV Stick.
This process is getting more and more complicated, and it is possible that in the most recent versions of the system, you will have to wait for the developers of the launchers to update the apps so that they are compatible with the Fire TV Stick, since Amazon has updated its code to prevent users from doing this type of mischief.