I’ve found that in those cases its usually explorer that’s the culprit. Just having the removable drive open in explorer is enough to keep windows from being able to unmount the drive.

Lg TVs do occasionally nag you about connecting to the internet but are otherwise fine completely disconnected.

And even if there are legal ramifications. The fines are low enough that its a cost of doing business for the most part. Especially in comparison to the amount of money they make spying. Possibly on top of whatever else they sell depending on the business in question.

Most insidious part about the whole thing is the fact that most legal stuff is “licensed” rather than owned. A convenient legal fiction to allow them to revoke access at any time and (likely) keep your money.

Legal stuff isn’t much better these days. Advertisements unless you pau more, user tracking regardless, etc.

And these are the people who demand id to get back into your account if they find activity they deem suspicious.

At least with a TV you can actually turn off the WiFi and just not connect a network cable to it. In my case the TV periodically tries to connect and prompts me to check the network settings, so I’m fairly sure its not trying to randomly connect to an open WiFi network. YMMV I suppose. A decent workaround would be to set up a diff router or ssid and just blackhole that network from getting online at all. But that can be more technical than some people are comfortable with.

Don’t connect the TV to the internet. Buy a settop box like a shield TV and stream through that.