I can see that coming - examples are Amazon's sidewalk project and Apple airtags.

At present, connecting your device is an opt-in since you have to give it wifi creds. In the future, devices will be connected by default and you'll have to opt out if you want to disconnect. Even if you're one of the few people who opt out, devices are going to have fine print that they can always receive "critical" updates via mesh.

Eventually many devices simply assume they are always connected, it's baked into their operation. They'll delegate key features to the cloud and opt-out won't even make sense.

Crazy! This reinforces the idea of not agreeing to the Terms of Service when prompted. I've found you can easily avoid doing that on a Samsung.

Wonder if anyone here has ever used EMF / EMR paint? If that works as advertised, it maybe could put a stop to undesired mesh networking?

Getting to the point of having to take new devices apart...

And that won't work easily, or for too long. They will just embed stuff in chips.

Maybe we will see "Brazil" style setups with TV's in some sort of Faraday Cage

Then we burn the wireless card

Which violates the warranty. And if the TV can’t phone home it can just refuse to boot. So you need to root and modify firmware too.

The answer is not giving these companies money.

Tv warranties are only a year so that’s not much to worry about. I bought a top of the line Samsung many years ago. The warranty lasted only a year and some capacitors burned out it took lots of phone calls to get them to repair as it’s a design defect.

I’ve had to do it myself once as well.

I don’t care about voiding my warranty.

Yeah, I agree, best is to vote with my wallet.

Second best, though, is getting out the soldering iron.