My work health insurance recently offered a free scale and blood pressure monitor, I thought that's a nice perk, I'll use that, so I ordered with the intent of never using their app, just using it for my own tracking. The first time I used it, I got an email from my insurance company congratulating me and giving me suggestions. Both devices have a cellular modem in them, and arrived paired to my identity.

I destroyed them and threw them in a dumpster like that Ron Swanson gif.

All to say, little cellular modems and a small data plan are likely getting cheap enough it's worth being extra diligent about the devices we let into our homes. Probably not yet to the point of that being the case on a tv, but I could certainly see it getting to that point soon enough.

Yup. Works great. All things equal I'd prefer just not buying a damn Smart TV to begin with, but absent that as a realistic option (every 4K TV I've ever seen is smart) I'll happily settle with them never seeing one byte of Internet.

Someone should start a blog where it's all clickbait titles and the articles are all once sentence with the obvious resolution to the bait.