The sad part of all of this was that the company that does this tried to poach me back in 2013 or 2014, but I was disgusted by the practice, so I refused to even interview.
Since then, I've made sure every single TV I own has this turned off (I go through the menu extensively to disable, and search on Google and reddit if it's not obvious how to disable like the case with Samsung).
I have an LG Smart TV, and just a week or two ago I was going through the settings and found Live Plus enabled, which means either they renamed the setting (and defaulted this to on), or the overrode my original setting.
Either way, I'm super annoyed. I want to switch to firewalling the TV and preventing any updates, but I need a replacement streaming device to connect to it.
Does anyone have recommendations for a streaming device to use (presumably one with HDMI CEC, that supports 4k and HDR)? I use the major streaming services (Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV) and Jellyfin.
An Apple TV 4k: https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/
It will just work. You will maybe get an ad or two from Apple, rarely, about Apple services, but it's very rare and easy to ignore.
Otherwise you only get ads if your service(Netflix, etc) delivers ads.
Apple won't share your data with anyone, and generally does a fairly decent job(compared to other giant tech companies) of not collecting much.