> disconnect the wireless radio from the main board

Can you explain why you can't just not give the TV your Wi-Fi password?

Or are we worried about the case when the TV did have Wi-Fi (due to it being mandatory for some initial setup, say), but we don't trust that "Forget Network" and "Wi-Fi off" are actually honored?

Suppose the device surreptitiously reconnects to Wi-Fi in spite of being told to forget it. You may be able to block it in your router and failing that, change the access point password.

No?

Our Samsung fridge will mesh network with any Samsung TV specifically to exfiltrate marketing info, at least according to the manual. (The fridge even has marketing surveillance cameras in it).

I assume at some point, appliance manufacturers will start "partnering" with things that actually need WiFi for exfiltration purposes. Phones would be a good place to start.

That way, we'd need to either Faraday cage our friends' phones, not invite them over, or send marketing pervs video feed of our moldy pickles.

Xfinity runs an open WiFi for its customers. If you instead their gateway and don’t change anything (which is 99% of users) any Xfinity customer can get online. Several of my neighbors have them, and you can’t walk around in my commercial district without seeing the “Xfinity WiFi” SSID. It would be smart for TV mfrs to do a deal with Xfinity and their equivalents world wide in order to sell viewer data to advertisers and receive “fresh” ads, even if the TVs are excluded from the residential network.

It might connect to a neighbor's WiFi if it has no password.

To prevent RF transmission.

We're worried about it connecting to a neighbor's unsecured network or some sort of unpublished mesh capability for exfiltrating your data and downloading ads.