I once had a Samsung smart TV that was on the lower end of the price scale. It had Ethernet but no Wi-Fi (this was back in 2014ish so wifi was a “premium” feature). I didn’t have an Ethernet drop near the TV so I bought a USB wifi dongle and used that. A year or two later I was messing around with a Raspberry Pi and needed a wifi dongle, so I took the one from the TV. Lo and behold the smart tv features kept working. It must have had wifi hardware that was disabled in software and the wifi dongle somehow tricked it into working…long story to say that I bet with 5G TVs will start phoning home and nothing short of a faraday cage will be able to stop it.
