Our brand-new LG OLED doesn’t even beg. It asked at setup time, I selected “not in your marketing drone’s wildest dreams”, it said “cool, bro”, and hasn’t bothered us in the last two weeks.
We don’t even see the TV’s home screen. Just power on the Xbox/Apple TV/whatever and HDMI CEC turns everything on and sets inputs.
I see nothing in that article that supports your claim, other than LG will sniff your network if you explicitly give it a network connection. Additionally, the LG TV has to go through an AV receiver and the Apple TV before it finds an Ethernet port. There is no doing it “sneakily” if the other devices don’t cooperate, and they don’t. On top of everything else, there is no traffic on my network that gives me cause for concern, I looked. On top of all that, think about the cost of implementing this versus the odds of there being a device on the other end of that HDMI cable that supports such functionality (very low).
In the end, it would appear that you are mixing a little bit of truth with a whole lot of urban legend.
We don’t even see the TV’s home screen. Just power on the Xbox/Apple TV/whatever and HDMI CEC turns everything on and sets inputs.