Why not take advantage of the subsidized price of the “smart” model, never plug it into the internet or connect it to wifi, and just plug in your devices of choice? Best of both worlds.
I think the only real problem with that is at some point (if they aren't already) they will embed cellular modems and just exfiltrate the data that way. They do this now in cars, why not TVs too?
1) From the perspective of the manufacturers that's theft of service. The manufacturers will implement measures to ensure your use of the TV is contingent upon them continuing data collecting and serving ads. Think TVs piggybacking off any available wireless connection (even LTE or 5G), or simply refusing to function until the network is set up.
2) That's still a lot of potentially crash-prone crud that's running. Better to just buy a Sceptre or maybe a large computer monitor, and have nothing running that isn't dedicated to "get pixels into eyeballs".
If this model of "theft of service" is legally enforceable, then significant swaths of this industry are engaging in false advertising and possibly full-on fraud by not making this agreement they're entering into clear to customers prior to their purchase of the device
From an ethical perspective, you will never convince me to feel bad about any "theft" of this kind, and this kind of dilution of concepts like "theft" and "crime" is likely responsible for the emotional valence of those terms reading a lot less significantly negative to people
I'm not saying that you should feel bad about it. What I am saying is that the manufacturers won't feel bad about fighting you on this issue, and coming up with ways to force you to see the advertisements they want you to see, and turn over the data they want on you.
It's a principle I'll call Kellner's Law: If a company makes a product or service available free or at a discount by involving advertisers, from the company's perspective that creates an implicit contractual obligation on the customer's part to see the ads; and any attempt to take advantage of the freebie/discount whilst avoiding the ads will be considered a form of theft, legitimizing any technical or legal means at the company's disposal to force customers to see the ads, or else to withdraw service from those who try to avoid them. Kellner's Law explains a lot of corporate behaviors in this space, including crackdowns by YouTube and other sites on Web-based ad blockers.
I named it for Jamie Kellner, a television executive who when TiVo (which famously allowed skipping ads in television programs recorded to the device) came out, said "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots" and that skipping ads with a device like TiVo was "actually stealing programming".
Kellner's law. I like it. It's an excellent illustration of the cowardice and hostility toward customers that comes from being in the subscription-twiddling business model
If Kellner wanted to make a deal with cable subscribers, why didn't he advertise cable that way? "If you buy our package and agree to watch ads when they come on in order to support our monetization model, you can watch over a hundred channels!"
But he didn't do that, of course. Instead, when his business model clashed with reality, he blamed the customers for violating an imaginary contract they never signed. Just because execs want to imagine violations of their assumptions as crimes doesn't mean that they actually are, and we should be using every meager lever of power we have access to to prevent governments from making laws to appease people like him, because every time a law like that is made, more people's rights are made subject to the arbitrary retroactive demands of delusional businessmen
Unfortunately 99.998% of the population can't do that. I'm glad you found a solution for yourself, but that doesn't help everyone else, so everyone else will reward the manufacturers by buying them and leaving them able to phone home, so manufacturers will just push the boundaries a little further next time and that might impact you in a way you can't easily mitigate.
Obviously, but I also vote for right to repair laws and "reward" the right manufacturers by telling my family to buy devices that are easier to hack/repair.
