Steve and Wendell are treasures. Looking forward to the investigation and the findings. I live in the EU, I own a C2 that is not connected to the internet, and all LG and Alphonso endpoints are blackholed on the network, however I'd love to dumbify the TV further with some hardware intervention.

Is there such a thing as buying a smart TV and switching out the motherboard to get a dumb TV?

It would be nice if our smartest hackers would address the problem and hack these TV sets to our advantage.

Seems to me we need to:

(1) Reverse engineer/disassemble the code to find out exactly how they're stealing our data.

(2) Hack the firmware to restore both our privacy and user-friendly functionality.

(3) Send garbage/random noise back to LG and Samsung, et al to overwhelm their servers—and actually cost them money for collecting our data.

Of course, this ought to be a temporary measure until our legislators listen to us and make what these manufacturers are doing strictly unlawful.

Or like, cut the traces to the antenna?

I think your best best is to use something like pihole or another software for your router to block the TVs DNS resolution or ability to reach outside your network. I'm feeling pretty smug today about doing that on mine a while back, if only to keep it from nagging me about constant software updates.