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I have a “smart” TV. It wouldn’t let me get past setup until I put it on wifi, so I spun up a hotspot, then immediately killed it and just plugged in a micro PC running Linux to the HDMI port.
Occasionally, I’ll sit on the remote and a pop up happens saying I’ll need to connect to the Internet for <feature> to work, but that’s about it.
If you watch the video, (oh boy was it long but informative) it likely is still spying on you rampantly and using neighbors as hotspot points to send the data.
Unlike smartphones, they are plugged in so they can just run speech to text (and the TVs that the op had could hear 20m away in other rooms with the mic array) forever. If you sell the TV or something and it ever connects to the internet again, it will likely dump all of that plaintext data corresponding to your physical location.
I have a “smart” TV. It wouldn’t let me get past setup until I put it on wifi, so I spun up a hotspot, then immediately killed it and just plugged in a micro PC running Linux to the HDMI port.
Occasionally, I’ll sit on the remote and a pop up happens saying I’ll need to connect to the Internet for <feature> to work, but that’s about it.
If you watch the video, (oh boy was it long but informative) it likely is still spying on you rampantly and using neighbors as hotspot points to send the data.
Unlike smartphones, they are plugged in so they can just run speech to text (and the TVs that the op had could hear 20m away in other rooms with the mic array) forever. If you sell the TV or something and it ever connects to the internet again, it will likely dump all of that plaintext data corresponding to your physical location.