Watching the actual investigation video the article is based on, it turns out that alot of the statements in the article don't really hold up to closer scrutiny.

I couldn't find any "smoking gun" or discovery of malicious intent.

What's left in the end is the already-known fact in the tech-community: The most-common, most-vulnerable and most-equipped device to spy on you in your home is your Smart-TV.

1. It has all the compute-power and sensors it needs

2. It already does some spying for ad-profiling

3. If a hacker exploits it, it's a problem

And it's the only device that "normies" own that has reliable power and reliable internet 24/7. This means you can use it for nefarious purposes, even wastefully so, and it won't show up as suspicious battery drain or prematurely hitting the cell plan's data cap.

For a lot of hacker type stuff (esp. botnets and residential proxies), this is exactly what you want.

I used to believe that piracy couldn't come back in a significant way because people don't want to use computers any more, and phones are a really bad fit for p2p, even if running some hypothetical non-walled-garden OS that wouldn't have issues with that sort of thing. I entirely failed to appreciate the impact of cheap Android TV boxes here.

But also

4. Every single fucked up thing it did was indeed listed in their customer agreement and privacy policy

Reads like a smear campaign in my opinion. Watch for new American product launches in the next few days.