“Smart TV” describes who owns the software, not what the screen can do. Take the set off the internet and you do not lose Netflix — you move it onto hardware you chose, that costs a tenth of the television, and that you can throw away when it disappoints you.
This guide is assembled from manufacturer support documentation, from the settings paths reported across the current round of privacy coverage, and from how home networks actually behave. Menu wording moves between model years and regions, so treat every path below as a place to start looking rather than an exact address. See how we work.
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The Gamers Nexus investigation into LG televisions sent a lot of people looking for the network settings. What most of them found was advice that contradicts itself, so start there.
The advice going round contradicts itself
Two recommendations have been circulating side by side. Install the firmware updates, because there are unpatched remote code execution flaws. And disconnect the television from the internet, because of what it sends home. Both are sound. Together they are impossible, and nobody printing them seems to have noticed.
The resolution is in two halves. First, both LG and Samsung publish firmware for manual installation from a USB stick, so a set with no network connection can still be patched — you download on a computer and carry it across. Second, and more to the point: a remote code execution flaw needs something remote. A television with no route to the internet is not reachable by anyone who is not already inside your house, which means the unpatched bug stops being your problem the moment the set goes dark on the network.
Patch it once, on the way out. Then disconnect it and stop thinking about it.
What actually breaks
Worth being exact about, because the fear of losing everything is what keeps most people connected.
| Stops working | Carries on |
|---|---|
| Every streaming app on the set — they need live manifests from a CDN | Every HDMI input. The panel renders what arrives on the cable |
| The app store, and app updates | The built-in tuner, if you use an aerial or coax |
| Voice assistants — ThinQ, Bixby, Alexa, Google — which process in the cloud | USB playback of local files |
| Watch history and recommendations | HDMI-CEC, so one remote still drives the chain |
| Over-the-air firmware updates | Picture and sound settings, calibration, everything about image quality |
Read the left column again. Apart from the firmware, every one of those is a thing a streaming box does, and does better, because it gets updated for longer and its interface is not built to sell advertising against your viewing.
Nothing in the right column is affected at all. Picture quality is a panel property. It does not know whether the television is online.
Step one: turn off content recognition before you disconnect
Do this first, not last. Consent you withdraw now stays withdrawn if the set ever finds a network again — a house move, a guest, a firmware reset, someone helpfully reconnecting it.
nn| Brand | What to look for |
|---|---|
| LG | Settings, then General or System, then Live Plus — off. Then Settings, Support, Privacy & Terms, User Agreements |
| Samsung | Settings, General & Privacy, Terms & Privacy, Viewing Information Services — off |
| Roku and TCL Roku sets | Settings, Privacy, Smart TV Experience — disable the options there |
| Vizio | Menu, System, Reset & Admin, Viewing Data — off |
Two warnings that matter more than the paths themselves.
On Samsung the reporting describes three separate switches rather than one, and turning off the prominent one leaves the others running. Work through the whole privacy section rather than stopping at the first toggle that looks right.
And these settings do not always survive an update. Samsung has a documented history of re-enabling them across major OS versions, and coverage of the post-settlement firmware rolling out in April and May 2026 reported some preferences resetting on first boot. Anything you switch off is worth re-checking after every firmware update — which, once the set is offline, means after every one you install deliberately.
Step two: forget the network, do not just pull the cable
This is where most attempts fail. Unplugging the ethernet cable does nothing if the Wi-Fi credentials are still stored, and the LG investigation reported sets holding data locally while disconnected and uploading it the moment a connection returned. Intermittent disconnection buys you nothing against that behaviour. It only delays the upload.
- Go into the network settings and forget or delete the saved Wi-Fi network, then confirm the set shows no saved credentials.
- Unplug the ethernet cable as well if one is fitted.
- Decline the reconnection prompt when it appears, and expect it to keep appearing.
- If setup insists on a connection before it will finish, complete setup, then remove the network afterwards.
Step three: block it at the router as well
Belt and braces, and it covers the case where someone reconnects the set without telling you. Any of these work on their own; together they are close to airtight.
nn- Block the television’s MAC address in the router’s access control list. The set can associate with the network and still reach nothing.
- Turn off UPnP. It lets devices open outbound paths without asking, and almost nothing in a normal house needs it.
- Put the set on a guest network or its own VLAN. This is the one that stops the device enumeration described in the LG investigation, because the sweep only finds what shares its network segment. If you keep the television online for any reason, do this one.
- Filter at the DNS layer with something like NextDNS or a Pi-hole. Useful, but understand the limit: it stops lookups, not traffic to addresses the set already knows. Treat it as a supplement, never as the whole answer.
Step four: put the apps back
Here is the part that makes the whole exercise painless rather than an act of self-denial. Every app you just switched off exists on a streaming box, and the box updates for longer than the television’s app layer will.
Apple TV is the one named most often in this discussion, for the narrow and checkable reason that it does not run content recognition against your screen. Roku and Fire TV hardware is cheaper and runs the same apps, but both are advertising businesses with their own data collection, so moving to one of those is a change of landlord rather than a move out. That trade is yours to make; it should just be made knowingly.
Whichever you choose, the structural gain holds. The device doing the watching is now a hundred-dollar box on an HDMI port, not a fifteen-hundred-dollar panel you are stuck with for a decade. When its terms change in a way you dislike, you unplug it and buy another.
If you would rather keep it connected
A reasonable position, and there is a middle path. Turn off content recognition, withdraw the advertising and voice consents, put the set on its own VLAN or guest network so it cannot enumerate anything, and let it have internet for firmware only.
That keeps the security updates arriving automatically and removes the network mapping, which is the finding hardest to justify as a television feature. What it does not remove is content recognition on the manufacturer’s terms — you are trusting a toggle rather than a disconnected cable, on a platform with a record of resetting toggles. Whether that trade is acceptable depends on how much the automatic updates are worth to you.
Frequently asked questions
Will the picture quality suffer if the TV is offline?
No. Panel performance, processing, upscaling and calibration are all local to the set and run identically with no connection. The one genuine loss is that some manufacturers ship picture-processing improvements inside firmware updates, which is another argument for patching by USB occasionally rather than never.
Can I still update the firmware with no internet?
Yes. LG and Samsung both publish firmware for manual installation. Download the file for your exact model number on a computer, copy it to a FAT32-formatted USB stick, and install it from the television’s software update menu. Check the model number carefully — a file for a neighbouring model is not a safe thing to flash.
Does a VPN on the router solve this instead?
No, and this is a common misunderstanding. A VPN changes the apparent origin of the traffic. It does not stop the television collecting a device list, fingerprinting your screen or sending any of it. The data still arrives at the same destination, from a different-looking address. Segmentation and blocking are the tools for this job.
Can I buy a television with no smart features at all?
Not easily in the consumer market, where the advertising revenue now subsidises the panel price. The category that does exist is commercial and digital signage displays, which ship without an app layer — but they cost more for the same panel, often lack a tuner, and rarely match a consumer OLED for picture processing. Buying a good set and refusing to connect it remains the cheaper route to the same outcome.
Is my streaming box collecting data too?
Roku, Fire TV and Google TV all run advertising businesses and collect accordingly. The difference is not that a box is innocent, it is that the box is cheap, replaceable and separable from a display you intend to keep for ten years. Check the privacy settings on whatever you buy with the same suspicion you brought to the television.
Sources
- LG USA Support — updating TV software, including the USB method
- Samsung Support — updating software on a Samsung smart TV by USB
- Tom’s Guide — turning off data collection across brands
- Malwarebytes — on the webOS vulnerabilities and network segmentation
