The whole "void warranty if any changes are made" is mostly not enforcable in Europe and as I understand it in some part in the US. In Germany, you would just have to proof that your change is not the culprit of the damage. I.e. if your OLED panel breaks, you can still claim warranty.

Key quote:

The news of Samsung's upcoming TV will likely be a blow to Huawei, which is reportedly working on its own 5G 8K TV. Sharp is also working on its own 8K+5G initiative – both companies will need to hurry up if they want to beat Samsung to the punch, though.

5G TVs may not be in our homes yet, but they're on our doorstep.

And this comment is late to the conversation, but with 5G TVs, all of your streaming will go over 5G. No opportunity to use tooling to block ads or inspect what is being "phoned home." There are a good number of people whose primary uses for home internet are streaming and web browsing.

If these same TVs have a "WiFi hotspot app" that turns on a hotspot for an extra subscription, the TV manufacturers and their telecom partners will execute an end-around on the wired connectivity business.

Competition is good, but not when it's offering cheap internet in exchange for stripping consumers of any control whatsoever over their privacy.

Worth noting that these articles are from 2019 and there hasn't been much talk of 5G TVs since. Aside from plain old 5G hype, SK Telecom wants 5G TVs as part of their envisioned ATSC/5G convergence that would bring more OTT services to broadcast TV (using their 5G network, naturally). This is mostly for the Korean market, since in North America broadcast TV is less popular and 5G networks have less capacity.

Legal issues aside, there might be loss of company image and also privacy related matter (I can run an open wifi to see the data that my neighbour TV sends).

And to add to this: There has been no proof ever that modern TVs do this, and it would be quite easy for anyone/journalists/reviewers to check this (just run an open wifi and monitor it).

And I would be surprised if they did... the belief in these sorts of tech urban legends/conspiracy theories that some seemingly techie people have is cringeworthy.

And no, Facebook/Instagram aren't listening to users either, it would need too much bandwidth/server power to process all those conversations, and if you say "they can do the speech recognition on the users' phones", the majority of users use budget phones that don't have that sort of power.

Until someone makes a honeypot library that just spams Google Cast/AirPlay 2 streams when it sees a random TV join

It would be pretty easy to check and validate if that's true.

In my sample size of two different brands, this isn’t true.

Would be surprised if they don't include 5G in order to gain permanent unfiltered access. Sending that sweet telemetry data has priority.

The asymmetry between the costs for the returns process and the 'happy path' of sales is such that even a relatively small percentage would throw a giant spanner in the works. You need to sell three more to make up for one return or so.