> Works til they put a 5g modem in the damn things.
Okay, but it does work until then. "Things could change in the future" is definitionally true.
Never connect the TV in the first place, and you don't need to physically alter the hardware, firmware, or TOS agreements.
Have you heard of Amazon Sidewalk (https://sidewalk.amazon/)? All those Rings and Alexas in your neighborhood are able to serve as network proxies for random IoT devices.
LG very likely has your neighbor's WiFi password, so even if you don't connect it to your own network, they could theoretically just try and connect to any known network nearby. No 5g modem needed.
Idk if they do that, but it doesn't seem complicated to implement, and it doesn't seem to fall outside of the company's ethical boundaries.
I think enough customers freely connect their devices to the internet that they don't need to invest in the engineering required to include those kinds of things. I agree they won't have ethical qualms about it. It would also be pretty easy to spot; I feel confident saying they'd be too greedy to be sufficiently sneaky to keep it hidden.
For now, it remains easy and sufficient to not give them your wifi credentials.
How do we know that they're not already putting 5G modems in them?
Smarter people than me are usually pretty good at guessing what PCB components do just by looking at the shape of them. I guess that's not proof but it's enough for me.
And these "smarter people" are opening up ever single TV from dozens of manufacturers with hundreds of models in all countries to check?
People need to stop pretending there can only exist a single hardware/software configuration that also never changes.
Because people aren't harvesting them for 5G modems with "free" data plans.
Why do you assume it would be "free" just because you aren't paying seperately for it? They also could throttle the speed to be unusable for average surfing but still work just fine for telemetry of a few MB a day.