I’ve found that in those cases its usually explorer that’s the culprit. Just having the removable drive open in explorer is enough to keep windows from being able to unmount the drive.

Lg TVs do occasionally nag you about connecting to the internet but are otherwise fine completely disconnected.

And these are the people who demand id to get back into your account if they find activity they deem suspicious.

At least with a TV you can actually turn off the WiFi and just not connect a network cable to it. In my case the TV periodically tries to connect and prompts me to check the network settings, so I’m fairly sure its not trying to randomly connect to an open WiFi network. YMMV I suppose. A decent workaround would be to set up a diff router or ssid and just blackhole that network from getting online at all. But that can be more technical than some people are comfortable with.

Don’t connect the TV to the internet. Buy a settop box like a shield TV and stream through that.

Not only that but between the various web tracking technologies that advertisers use and people’s reuse of credentials for convenience you now have an easier way to associate a real identity with a specific person as they browse the internet. A boon to advertisers and other interested parties alike.