Sitting screens considered harmful.

Treat them as a liability and "trash"-adjacent, no matter the actual display technology or whether you can remove the spyware.

That goes double for TVs, so don't buy one.

Re-invest the time and attention you save in a good projector and a generally "invisible" screen / room setup.

I'm a happy owner of a $1000 DLP LED projector and a similarly priced motorized 150" screen. Do look into laser projection, which has been getting steadily more affordable for a while now.

Disclaimer: I've never subscribed to the "maximum screen size" formulas. As long as my own nose isn't in the way when I look to either end, it's fine, and inching towards that range is exactly what I'm deliberately going for. So yes, I'm one of those people who sits in the front rows at the movies.

I keep filler-free shows (TNG, anyone? :') movies and game time strictly out of band. So to me that's even more enjoyable in an immersive and optimally shareable setup whenever I do purposefully take the time.

More reading, as well as a nudge towards doing stuff, is probably the main side effect I'm after here, as you can tell.

Vote for politicians who fight for privacy and right to repair.

The easiest solution is to never give the TV network access at all (no WiFi, no Ethernet) and only drive it over HDMI, via an Apple TV for example. The onus then shifts to how much you trust Apple, and the TV becomes mostly a dumb display. That still isn’t a 100% guarantee, though, since the TV has radios and could potentially talk to other networks or devices without your knowledge. If you want certainty, the only real option is to remove the radios entirely, which can have side effects, like the remote no longer working if it relies on BLE.

Personally, I don’t like LG’s “smart” apps, so never using them isn’t much of a loss.

But if you’re more technically inclined and want to use a product you paid for the way you want, you can do what I did with my C1:

Root it, put it on a restricted VLAN with no WAN access and no outbound privileges to any device on the LAN, and enable SSH. These displays run webOS, which is Linux-based. Yes, you can literally SSH into your TV. :)

That let me deploy my own custom app that I drive over the network. My display also never actually turns “off”. I just paint black pixels when I’m not using it, so it’s very snappy when I want something on the screen. It works as a spare data and metrics display while I’m working, and as a media player (a simplified DIY Plex) when I’m not.

So I get the “smart” part of the TV without the privacy concerns.

Smart TVs are just a normie alternative for what tech enthusiasts were doing for 30ish years: put a computer next to the tv and use it.

Alternative, get yourself something capable of running Moonlight (https://moonlight-stream.org/) and run Sunshine (https://app.lizardbyte.dev/Sunshine/) on your workstation, I am even playing games this way. RPI 5 works great, also libreelec (https://libreelec.tv/) is excellent and has Moonshine plugin.

You buy a TV, NEVER connect it to the internet and set up small computer next to it. Obviously not Android based as it is spyware on its own.

Then use it. It is that simple. No special methods, software, whatever needed, tv becomes only a large monitor for your computer conveniently placed in living room.

[1] https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U650CV-UMS-65-4K-UHD-TV...

Now many people are also claiming that TVs will surreptitiously connect to an open network, but as far as I can tell, there is no evidence of this actually happening [0]. Of course it’s technically possible, but until a researcher actually observes this behavior I would not lose sleep over this.

[0]: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/how-to-use-smart-tv-offline