I made a quick gallery of my recent adventure taking apart two remotes which is shared below:

Sony Bravia TV Universal Remote

Onn 4K Plus Streaming Device Remote

Procedure: Both remotes had plastic tabs holding them together. I was able to pry them apart with a guitar pick (credit card would work too) and separate the body from the internal remote board. The Sony remote (Green circuit board) was kind enough to label the component as "MIC1" with the screen printing so I flipped it over and removed the black adhesive covering over the Mic hole. The Mic hole is very small and I did try a few things before settling for a #1 flathead screwdriver from my iFixIt kit. The irony of using that kit to destroy something is not lost on me here. Anyway, I placed the screwdriver into the empty Mic hole and applied firm even pressure and let the flathead dig into the board. I went slow and could tell I was making progress when the Mic component on the other side of the board lifted away. At that point I backed out the screwdriver and used tweezers to pull off the Mic. Then quick reassembly and testing and all functions were good!

For the Onn 4k Plus Streaming remote (Black circuit board) I was able to follow the same procedure above where I used the pick to open the remote, used the screwdriver to apply even pressure to screw into the Mic hole and lift the component from underneath until I could get tweezers under it. I did however encounter an issue where a copper trace lifted with the component. It was very thin and I peeled back only enough to get a razor blade under it and sever it from the board. Then re-assemble and tested with no issues. All in all, for me with experience taking electronics apart it was about 20 minutes of working. I have one more Onn remote and a Samsung remote with a solar charger on the back to do next.

To get ahead of the comments on why I didn't use a razor blade or heat gun to remove the mic: I tried a razor blade at first on the Sony remote but discovered that the component was soldered so close to the board that I would have to destroy the screenprint to get underneath it. Unfortunately I don't trust myself with a heat gun either since I didn't have Kapton tape to protect the other components.

If there is enough interest I can post the reassembled remotes for matching them or images of the Samsung remote surgery when I do it as well. Hope you all find this encouraging for how to do it on your own!

Gallery of Images: https://postimg.cc/gallery/tHX4fyD

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading all these threads where people take pliers to their tv remotes.

Just use a razor blade to cut the traces. If you don’t know that you got them use a multimeter beep test to measure on either side of your cut.

There's a chance that the trace leads to other 'critical' components and you may need to bridge the contacts.

I would like to do this too

As someone who has destroyed many PCBs, peeling off components can peel off the contacts traces. It can even pull contacts and traces from the underside of the board if the component is soldered through the board, like that LED probably is.

My hot take: if you can't trust the microphone in the device, you can't trust the device and shouldn't be using it at all to begin with.

Good point up until every available device has that "feature". Eventually diy is the only way to go.

Noice.

Diy as in make a good device like kodi box, right?

right?

point of op still stands.

We are pretty much already there.

just use kapton tape, flux and a heat gun.

This is why technological workarounds are not a substitute for consumer protection regulation.

To get ahead of the comments on why I didn't use ...

they just didn't have kapton tape, it's worth buying or you can get heat resistant tape at any local hardware store

I mean, yeah. But that's not the reality we live in.

I have never seen any implementation of a microphone that has “critical” components in series with it.

I’d advise against that from an engineering perspective because microphone failure is often a break in the conductive path and standard troubleshooting of non audio in failures generally doesn’t place a high priority on checking mics for continuity.

Even on a throwaway component like a remote, requiring microphone continuity would introduce unnecessary complexity and more chance for problems.

Never liked the idea of talking to a remote, and found the massive netflix button on my sony remote really offensive.
I've happily used a third party universal remote instead.

Yes, but most people don't even have one of those 3, let alone all 3.

Just get a cheap universal remote controller

Nice. I just stuck a pin in the hole and scramble it. Then fill it with a drop of superglue.

There is also the chance that the PCB has more than 2 layers and the traces connecting the microphone to the next component (which could be BGA mounted, such as a pin of an IC) is inaccessable.

I liked it at first because I thought it would let my bypass the horrendous on-screen keyboard. Then I learned that these things are likely recording even when the button isn't pressed and I decided on this project. I'll take garbage on-screen keyboard over eavesdropping remotes any day.

Most TVs support both Infrared (IR) and Bluetooth. Just get an IR remote and take the battery out of the old one. I just got a basic IR-only one for an LG TV for $6. Works like a charm.

I added some pictures for reference in the gallery link and if you do it just take your time and be careful. Remotes are easier to replace than TVs, but it would still be inconvenient if it broke. Good luck!

I just never let my tv connect to the internet and intercept the HDMI CEC using a usb CEC interceptor on my Linux box and run everything off of that. I'm more afraid of screen capture or transcription than any sort of audio TV manufacturers may pick up, so I make the tv dumb and my own hardware smart and open source.

This is the mindset I had when I posted my procedure. While I could have gotten all three and de-soldered it properly, it isn't something most people can do. I didn't want my post technique to feel unapproachable by people with small tools and steady hands. Thanks for mentioning this since I forgot to!

This is true, the mic did not appear to be in series with anything critical since I did lift a trace in the Onn remote. When I looked at the board I saw how small and close together the traces were. I didn't have the datasheet for the model of Mic I found on the board, so I just decided the remote was better without it entirely. It may not have been the most elegant solution but it did work. I will consider the razor blade option in the future once I get some leads that are both thin and sharp enough to pierce the small traces.

So you're saying not tech savvy people should not use devices?
I think it's nice being able to remove the mic.

That gallery site was an interesting choice for a post on privacy… My phone has an extra mic installed after trying to navigate it.

You can just.. not put your TV on the internet?

It was revealed that LG TVs record and store conversation data and screen data until they are able to phone home, including scanning surrounding WiFi connections and connect to free hotspots automatically.

You can (most likely) connect your phone to the TV to write but i don't know hoe goof of an idea it is from a privacy POV

Dumb TVs are a bit more expensive, but definitely worth it.

Lemmy would only let me upload one photo and while I don't upload galleries often, I know Imgur is not the way to go anymore. Is there a privacy-based free image hosting site I should be using?

No, I'm saying that what we really need is regulation, not technological workarounds.

I don’t know tbh, but I’ve seen many lemmy posts with multiple images… maybe it depends on your client, or were you using the web interface?

But even a Dropbox or google drive wouldn’t have that level of scamware popping up all over the place.

Don't take my word for it, but perhaps a Mastodon post shared to Lemmy. But you'd have to hunt down one that accepted copious amounts of text, and that's saying Lemmy clients would format the result decently.

local_site_rate_limit
image 50
image_per_second 3600

I don't get it, you should be able to upload 50 images an hour.

Sounds like a hearty breakfast.

Also, any battery powered device will not record you for very long, so they are not doing that. It’s all the mics in the tv that are the real issue.

I've been using the F-Droid app Blorp, testing its features. I might try switching to another client and see if the app was the limiting factor.

Also, sorry about the ads in the gallery. I couldn't see them I guess thanks to my pihole/VPN? I stopped using Google Drive and Dropbox ages ago. Nextcloud and Proton Drive are all I have now.

This is good to know. It might have been my app, Blorp on F-Droid, that was the limiting factor for my image upload. Next time I'll try the browser directly. Thanks for posting the stats!

it isn't something most people can do

I get so sick of this mentality (not just for this, but for everything these days). It's always something that, short of disabilities maybe, almost anyone can learn to do with $25 in amazon bullshit equipment and a 15min youtube video, maybe not to a professional quality but serviceable enough. Expensive shit I understand, tbf.

They're not willing to put in any effort to learn it, they're not "unable" to, it's learned helplessness and pure T bona fide laziness 99% of the time especially when we ALL have the resources available to learn X. Tbh, you've already done more than "most people" are willing to in this guide alone by actually taking action, "most" would just complain and do nothing, but they ALL could fully desolder the mic with 15min of knowledge and the cheapest amazon kit, if they just fucking do it. Like dude I can do it, if I can do it anyone can, trust me, I'm not that much better than everyone else I'm just a guy with internet.

think of the flux as shaving cream and the heat gun as a razor that shaves off everything it touches (for enough time). You cover the components you don't want shaved off with kapton tape, apply the preheating heat (swirl the heat gun around the component too), melt the flux after applying a small amount of heat to preheat the area and then apply the regular heat

or a more technical explanation is:

we're melting the metal (solder) at a high temperature to free the components from the board, and we don't want to burn anything else or get a messy desoldered area so we use kapton tape and flux