The first thing I did when helping my parents set up their new LG OLED TV's at xmas was to disable all the ads and tracking. It's exhausting how much pressure they put on you to opt-in, and how many layers there are, constantly implying the TV will be nonfunctional without it.
But sure enough, it works just fine with no ads, no "free tv channels", and no voice functionality.
Have you ever checked back to see if updates had re-enabled some of those or introduced new ones? You'd hope they'd let you know if they started getting ads all the time, but the tracking stuff is much less obvious.
LG will send out updates that require you to accept new license agreements when you turn the tv on next. It’s very obvious about what they are tracking but very obnoxious in pointing it out. The parents that OP refers to probably just clicks accept all and moves on.
We have an LG tv and one of my family members hit accept all after an update and now my remote listens to us. To fix this properly I would need to factory reset which loses all of our streaming settings. I actually don’t because I have a separate ISP only for our TVs so there’s a bit of separation between our streaming use and phone activity
