Your neighbor's SmartTV might volunteer to the task of relaying tracking and ads to your SmartTV, with no manual setup involved.

Best solution for that is to open up the TV and disconnect the antenna.

the best offered solution should probably be a bit better than "throw away your warranty and labor to do X."

I think that's why people are just asking to buy non-smart TVs.

Any guides or recommendations on accomplishing this on LG equipment?

There are some videos around on the internet that show how to find the Wi-Fi module on an LG tv, for example the below. If you break your tv by trying this it’s on you.

https://youtu.be/gRrBZ2Eu5-I

Open the thing up and figure it out!

Great advice for breaking a $1000 piece of kit.

A convenient rule of thumb for this advice is that anyone who should follow it doesn’t need it. Everyone else should be redirected to a teardown video.

Or they embed a 4G/5G radio.

There's no evidence that smart TVs actually do that, aside from a few scant anecdotes from reddit.

They don't do it yet. I don't think it's crazy to imagine that changing, especially with stuff like Amazon's Sidewalk.

I have tried pretty hard (I came up with 100 common Wi-Fi names by googling around) and have never been able to get it to happen. With enterprise grade Wi-Fi gear it’s pretty trivial to create a ton of AP names and route them all to a test VLAN.

If it sounds like the idea comes with a tinfoil hat, best to investigate with a skeptical eye.

Networks with no password and no captive sign in portal are extremely rare nowadays. They are on by default and anyone with the IT ability to go in and change it will already know the dangers of letting anyone use the Internet you are paying for.

But also are there any actual confirmed cases of TVs doing this? The comment section here always fear mongers about it (kudos for not mentioning Amazon sidewalk), but it isn't anything worth worrying about currently.

> Networks with no password and no captive sign in portal are extremely rare nowadays.

In my suburban-American experience, they are in fact they are more common these days as more consumers purchase and own ISP-provided equipment.

> But also are there any actual confirmed cases of TVs doing this?

Given the nature of proprietary closed source software, I am willing to accept a less than charitable assumption of what they do.

Which ISPs are giving out APs with no key needed and no captive portal? Every one that I’m aware of requires some manner of secret to login to the shared AP.

There's nothing actually stopping an ISP from making a deal with a TV manufacturer to provide connectivity though, is there?

There’s also nothing stopping any of them from including an Iridium modem in their sets. Or using aircrack to try and break into a nearby network. Or any other tinfoil hat thing we can come up with.

There are literally thousands of paranoid security researchers who would love to post about something like this (hi), and none of them have. That’s hardly conclusive, but if it’s not good enough for you then maybe you should reconsider whether society is the place for you.

I'm sure they're not doing it now, I'm not sure they won't do it eventually. I don't think it can be done without people noticing but I'm also not sure they'll think that far ahead.

I don’t understand the point you’re making. Someone might eventually start doing something they’re not currently doing?

Why would you think LG/Samsung/Sony/etc don't have corp creds for every ISP AP on the planet?

That’s moving the goalpost pretty far, don’t you think?

No. Why do you think it is? If the business model is "connect to the mothership and feed us data at all costs", why wouldn't they just arrange with the ISPs to allow their devices to connect?

We were talking about open Wi-Fi networks.

This paranoid alternate reality where tv companies are paying every ISP for backdoor access is very, very far away from flipping the “opportunistically join open networks” bit. It’s also not borne out by either research or logic.

> at all costs

Nothing works like that. They don’t care about you, beyond the pennies they can make. If it costs (and it would) they won’t do it.

Not really, The default wifi router supplied by the biggest ISP here has got a guest network turned on by default.

Which ISP? Comcast in America does that crap, but it's worthless to snoopers since you need a Comcast account to do anything on it, so will actively need to log in.

Can you connect to it and get internet without hitting a captive portal that requires your ISP creds? That’s usually how it happens in the US.