i hate living in a cyberpunk dystopia

You know the irony of this is? My ex-fiances father was labeled as schizophrenic. I mean he was by textbook definition. One day, I would take her to visit him, he says that computers are tracking you. Now, I brushed it off at the time, probably a conspiracy theory right? but I did think about it.

L3 was tracking internet data already, at least, in the early 2000's. A little game of what's connecting to my computer showed me that, but I didn't know what it was at the time. Well now I know, g-sec company has been tracking us from routers for over twenty years; same company after the merger that makes EOTECHs. So the puzzle pieces came together.

I kind of wondered if he really was schizophrenic or medicated to be so? As an a example, tramadol made me have auditory hallucinations that I've never experience on acid or mushrooms (college lol).

I will still argue phones listen to us. Don't care what you say, it happens. Act accordingly

To be fair, OP didn’t claim that the remote wasn’t bricked…

Looking up which part to nuke took an hour, but anything to calm down my paranoid ass haha

We're really fucked aren't we.

So just remove my sim card and unplug my firewall? Got it.

Only the cone-magnet-coil-wires part is the same. All the electrical parts are different. There's no way.

Which means disconnecting it's WiFi, because some may connect to open hotspots without asking.

This is the far easier approach, but if you live somewhere densely populated (like an apartment building) keep in mind it’s been rumored that smart TVs can make a mesh network to upload data without a connection. Though to my knowledge this has never been definitively shown to be true

Nah they won't send the cops, you just gotta drink a verification can

I have heard that some vendors support joining adhoc networks with others of the same brand. So if you have an LG TV (as an example) that you dont connect to the internet, but your neighbor has one that is connected, they could theoretically link up and bridge the unconnected one.

To be fair, this would have to be functionality included in the factory, and may not actually be a thing. But I remember reading something about it with LGs a few years ago, and it stuck with me.

While it's not always the case, try to look for a 2x4 silver rectangle with a hole in it like the one on my finger. The casing is to isolate it from the nearby radio waves and the hole to let sound through.

The TV advetises voice recognition in both the TV itself and the remote.

If you look at it, it's likely going to be a 2x4mm silver rectangle with a small hole in it. Not always, but they mostly look like that.

There will almost always be a hole above it in the plastic remote housing.

MEMs microphones are a silver or black rectangle and it has to have a small hole in the top of the package https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/mems-microphones.html

Generally you can also just put a dab of hot glue over the top of the hole and it won't be able to hear shit, you don't necessarily have to desolder it, but it is the most effective.

To the WiFi?

You are often forced to in order to set it up at all, the damage is already done if you disconnect it or VLAN quarantine it after that.

It doesn't stop the TV from spying on you. GN just proved that it runs STT and records your conversations in plaintext and has the memory to store them for eternity. It also gets your location from scanning WiFi, Bluetooth, and any other devices in the band and geolocating based off of their data.

Then if you ever sell the TV, it will dump the data if they connect it, or somebody with the same brand smart TV moved in next door, it will use that TV's hidden SSID hotspot to jump the airgap and dump all if its (likely time and position stamped) transcribed spying data to the servers.

Hardware fix is literally the only fix.

And hope no open networks are in range, ever. Or it will exfiltrate collected data.