"Try buying plain TV (without YouTube and Internet), try buying non-smart phone..."
Disable data connection for both and you have "dumb" counterparts. Of course, you still pay for unnecessary features, but it's the price to pay if you value your privacy.
I bought 2 smart TVs recently and was able to turn all this BS off by simply not accepting the privacy policies during setup. Of course this means you can't use the built-in netflix apps or check for software updates or whatever but that's fine by me. I left both on my network for a period of time as well to check (via DPI) and indeed neither one was actually doing anything on the network other than pinging a software-update server every few days.
If you're worried about privacy just don't connect it to the Internet and buy a smart TV stick of your choice instead that you plug into the HDMI port of the TV (or use a Raspberry Pi if you don't trust those either). Problem solved.
Probably 99 % of people are fine with owning a smart TV, so it's clear that manufacturers won't cater to the 1 % that are not fine with it.
You can't really avoid smart TVs these days. Any model that has a good picture quality will have a higher end chipset, and with that higher end chipset TV manufacturers are just rolling Android since they largely don't have to worry about the UI etc.
Technically, all you should have to do is not enable Wifi/Ethernet and you're good to go. But I wouldn't put it past Samsung to look for open APs or connected Samsung products and secretly funnel data via that channel.
But it's a useful exercise to limit the discussion to TVs exactly because most TVs don't need any Internet connectivity at all! They just need to display input from other devices that are connected to the Internet.
The trend for Smart TVs these days is to leak data like a sieve. The small risk of vulnerabilities in e.g. a TV's HDMI layer being exploited is arguably a price worth paying for privacy.
I recall reading that there was a place to purchase bezel-less, stripped down TVs w/o the smarts, that are basically monitors without being the quality of monitors so they are cheap, and used for creating giant wall displays.
Just never connect it to the internet. No privacy issues either, right?
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