This is also my question, but I suppose the answer could be that we don't trust LG to actually forget the wifi password (and not use it surreptitiously later). You could also change the wifi info, but that might mean changing a whole lot of devices (including wife's and kids).
If someone is supposedly concerned about being recorded, having their privacy invaded etc. but they're too lazy to change the wifi password and deal with the trivial inconvenience of changing it on other household devices then in this case the revealed preference really is that they don't really care.
Technically, they could do a whole bunch of things, including doing multihop routing via other connected televisions or insecure WiFi networks. There's no evidence that they do this, as far as I know, but also no reason why they couldn't do this in the future if they wanted to.
Sorry but I don't understand this line of reasoning. You worry about a smart TV going online without your permission and yet you trust it enough to keep it around your home and keep it online???
I don't mean to be rude but it sounds like you just don't want to confront the rest of your household about taking the TV offline and are coming up with excuses to tell yourself this is actually fine.
The fact you don't do it means you actually don't care at all about your privacy. It takes 5 minutes to bring every member in an household in the living room or kitchen and assist them to change the wifi password on their device.
You can even prepare for it by printing the details + qrcode beforehand.
Connecting to a wifi network is one of those things every terminally connected non tech savy people are able to do these days.
I think the GP more meant the practice that some ISPs have of shipping default routers that may or may not be able to be replaced with a separate SSID that is publicly available for use by other customers of that ISP.
Not "my network has a default or empty password, I can't make people sign in again."
Is that really a thing? My ISP gives me a router that takes an SSID/password by default (that it gets back to if I reset to defaults) but I can change it any time as well as other parameters (like channels, wether WPS is activated, etc).
