I cringe anytime I go to a friends place and their TV is connected to their network. I can't believe people have gotten to comfortable with the privacy implicat

I cringe anytime I go to a friends place and their TV is connected to their network. I can't believe people have gotten to comfortable with the privacy implications of these devices being connected all the time. It wasn't that long ago that I think it was Samsung was caught with the mic always on or something? I don't remember. I hate how TV's have gone. I don't really consider myself an audiophile (or the picture quality equilvent) but I am willing to spend money on good sound and picture. Not spend a ton but cleanly middle ground on sound and high ground on picture quality. I have a 75" tv right now and eying an 85" when I upgrade this thing. I play a lot of video games, watch a lot of movies, so it is very worth it for me. I would happily pay a premium to not have all of this smart tv stuff thrown in that I will never use. There are display or other dumb TV's but from what I can tell they lack many of the bells and whistles that the top of the line TV's coming out today have. Which is what I care about. For example, getting rid of the Halo effect around lights. Something that could ruin a dark video game or movie. You could just say "don't connect it to wifi". Well the first obvious problem, I live in a city. There are a ton of unsecured Wifi networks nearby that it would be very easy for the TV to connect too. Even if not, if they entered an agreement with Xfinity and used their shared wifi network... I would wager they would be able to connect almost anywhere. Problem 2. I have had a number of times that randomly I would have signal issues with devices that had been working just fine. The only possible solution I could find was to update the firmware on the TV. Requiring me to connect it to the internet (I keep an ethernet cable nearby just for this use case) so it could update and likely send all of the data it was collecting anyways. I always connect an Apple TV to my tv for any streaming I want to do. That being said, If Apple actually truly put out a Smart TV that just ran TVos and didn't invade my privacy... I would likely buy it and have no hesitation on connecting it too the internet.