Does it need an internet connection to work as a display?
Stop stressing out, just don't connect the TV to the internet. Job done.
Also, this looks like the origin of the anecdote: https://web.archive.org/web/20200519095006/https://old.reddi...
To be fair it's a pretty popular meme, almost as popular as "facebook app is listening to you", despite having zero proof behind it. I'd be pretty annoyed if such unproven claims regularly show up in every hn thread about smart TVs.
>After the past decade of pretty much every conspiracy theory about big tech companies becoming true
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Alternatively, they could just brick the TV.
I agree that it's highly implausible that my neighbor would do either of these things, but they could, if sufficiently motivated.
It's a cool hack, and probably the only conceivable reason I'd ever let a TV take a firmware update, but it's hardly relevant to the topic of whether or not you should let your TV access the internet or whether or not Smart TVs are malicious when denied internet access during setup.
Vulnerability which allows to listen to you is not a symptom of a smart TV? Since when normal TVs have microphones and such vulnerabilities?