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.