I first went online about 45 years ago, and have made it a point in recent years to only get 'dumb' appliances (if possible).

We've refreshed most of our appliances as part of our house remodeling over the last 5 years, but a few things are pretty difficult to get without built-in 'smarts' and wifi. My Generac and garage door openers are examples of these. We recently got a SpeedQueen washer and dryer in part for this reason, the other being durability.

For the last 6-7 years there have been increasing rumors about devices like TVs connecting to any unsecured wifi network they happen to find in range and even more concerning - treating the setup option to not connect/not setup wifi as "don't connect to any wifi which requires credentials to connect to". A lot of this comes down to how much you can trust the companies that make the appliances, especially given that selling customer data has become an ever increasing component of their corporate revenue. ... or .. sending data back to the manufacturer's home country such as China.

There is a separate issue with automobiles. Every Car for some time now has a built-in celluar modem - for over 20 years for some brands and models. This bypasses the need to connect to Wifi or be setup by you. The auto manufactures are able to purchase bulk data SIMS from the carriers pretty cheaply to use cellular networks. Most of the time, but not always, they are not listening to your in car conversations, but consider how Voice Commands work, and look at the history of Law Enforcement using services like GM's OnStar to listen into in-car conversations decades ago.

And like other companies, all the automakers collect is sold to paying customers. Today many regular features on new cars require that you setup an online account with the manufacturer to even enable (I'm looking at you Honda). That's not including things they want to sell you subscriptions for like real-time traffic data.

My current daily driver (a 2011 model) has stopped snitching on me only because it was the only model variant in its line that a 4G modem upgrade was not made available for, and 3G cellular service was recently sunsetted to free up the spectrum.

I mention cars because there is no technical or regulatory reason to prevent home appliances or systems like HVAC from including cellular modems in the future. We might first see that in something like new AC systems with a justification such as "so that the local municipality can temporarily shut them off to reduce demand on the grid during a heat wave to avoid brown outs" (something I experienced first hand in my apartment in Texas 18 years ago).

Anyway, I hope this adds some food for thought for everyone here.