It's only disconnected until your neighbor's AP decides to advertise an open guest network for it to automatically connect to.
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.
If it sounds like the idea comes with a tinfoil hat, best to investigate with a skeptical eye.
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.
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.
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.
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.