If you don't trust the TV manufacturer to include spying devices in their product, there is no reason to believe the "dumb" TV you brought from them is any less capable.
... and what network will it be connecting to? Sure maybe a free hotspot here or there, but many of these TVs will not have access to even those.
And hell yeah you can prove it's not in there, either with a quick wireless scan or even a simple physical tear down of the housing which can then be put back together.
Show me a dumb TV that has been wired up to spy on people that has been in the wild before.
> You can do those things, but you're not going to.
This is a 100% trash point. I have yet to see an unknown device on my network from a dumb screen, let alone any additional microphones or cameras on said dumb screen. I have also not seen or heard of any reports of it becoming a spying type device. You mean to tell me the dumb panel I bought, which is from a major manufacture with known tear downs and a ton of buyers, managed to sneak this hardware in (even something like a cellular radio) and nobody noticed?
I'll repeat this for you so you perhaps it will impact you this time: Show me a dumb TV that has been wired up to spy on people that has been in the wild before.
Please come equipped with citations, references, and examples before commenting.
I don't trust the TV manufacturer to secure their initial release of their "smart" os, and I surely don't expect them to keep it patched. Anybody who breaks into your video-enabled tv can see everything you're doing...
Not if it isn't connected to a network. But its hardly as if devices with manufacturer-paid cellular connectivity built in and preconfigured don't exist, so there's no reason that it has to be your network.
To the extent that manufacturers are either monetizing networked services or deriving useful data from them, making them independent of end-user networking choices has a pretty clear benefit, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it become a common thing in Smart TVs.
This is getting well into ad absurdum (a common problem on HN). Smart TVs are perfectly fine for the person who doesn't want a smart TV. Just don't use any of the smart TV features and don't connect it to the network. Problem solved.