This report indicates there could be a security breach if a laptop uses a smart TV as a monitor:
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If you do, don’t put the TV on your network. Don’t connect Ethernet. Don’t configure Wi-Fi. And if the TV won’t let you use it without doing that, return it to the store and buy something else.
If they have no way to transmit their content, the danger will be minimal.
I suppose you could connect Ethernet long enough to get it up and running and then disconnect it again. Assuming it doesn’t decide to brick itself the way many software apps do (I’m looking at you, Adobe Photoshop Elements - which requires an active login even though it doesn’t require a paid subscription).
Sadly, it doesn’t appear to be possible to buy a “dumb” TV anymore. Just give me a few HDMI inputs, maybe one or two analog video inputs and antenna input and nothing else. That’s all I care about, because I’m streaming my content from an Apple TV. And dumb TVs don’t take several minutes to boot up when you turn them on.
I could use a computer monitor, but they don’t come in really large sizes (e.g. 65") and they don’t generally include speakers. My home theater room has a receiver and speakers, but I don’t have that set up in other rooms.
I don’t want to create a New Scientist account to read the whole article, but from web searching seems to have found the research paper it is based on:
Yes - I use a 32" LG monitor with my Macbook Air. Much better than a smart TV and it connects to the MBA with a single USB-c cable that provides power, video and access to an external hard drive that is connected to the USB port on the monitor. The monitor speakers are OK but this is not my main media setup.
I reluctantly replaced a dumb TV with a Hisense smart TV for use with my Apple TV 4K. I managed to set it up without connecting the TV to the internet. Annoyingly I now have make sure the ATV is awake before manually turning the TV on or it loses the video signal (i.e. blank screen). At least it remembers that the input is HDMI and doesn’t go through the smart TV boot up each time!
The ATV is unable to turn the TV on automatically (maybe because I have an HDMI splitter for sending output to the TV and/or a projector).
The New Scientist article is available on Apple News+. If articles require subscriptions, you can always go to the share icon in Safari and select “Open in Apple News”. Another trick to try for articles that require subscriptions is to open them in Reader mode. It didn’t work here, but I’ve had it work in other cases.
Concerning stopping tracking and ACR, several articles on the internet discuss how to do it for common TV brands. The article below has that information at its end:
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For the record, Amazon Fire TVs (TCL brand) can’t be used at all until you connect them to the Internet. So don’t buy one for your cabin in the woods.
That’s a useful article.
The remaining question is… if I did have to connect the TV to the internet in order to set it up, would it be snooping on my Apple TV usage via the HDMI cable? That is, does it snoop in the background, irrespective of the input? My guess is that it wouldn’t as the TV’s OS is not active.
In terms of Amazon Fire TV by TCL, the Amazon software is still running and active in the background even when you’ve switched to the Apple TV HDMI input. This is evidenced by the Alexa functions and overlays that are still available.