I have seen it. I like to run an open wifi AP. The way I have it set up it sort of sucks, throttled about as low as I can get it, you could read HN on it but most websites are very unpleasant to use. Anyway, the point is, for the most part my only customer is my neighbors samsung tv sending some sort of click and navigation updates back to the mothership. Now I don't "know" that it wasn't attached to intentionally. but I suspect the tv was just happy to attach to anything it could find.
You ever think about asking your neighbor? Could also make an interesting blog post as I think there are a lot of people interested in this subject. It's also not that easy of a topic to Google. The results all focus on how to connect your TV to wifi rather than trying to find the specific issue. There's definitely HN interest in it
So you are knowingly helping Samsung spy on your neighbor. Have you thought about the ethics of what you are doing.
Anyway while I would not call the original accusation of the TV using any open WIFI automatically out of the question this experiment provides little evidence of that. It's hardly unthinkable that your neighbor or someone using their TV just clicked OK on some prompts to make them go away and thereby selecting the first network in the list. It's also not unthinkable that your neighbor wanted to use some functionality that requires an internet connection to setup and just didn't pay attention to the WIFI network selection.
