> ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV.
So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification.
We're going to have to get saavy in pulling apart the distinction between "I look at everything and then send a nice summary back to my manufacturer" and "I send everything back to my manufacturer". As AI gets cheaper and more efficient, it'll be baked into everything, and will distill signal at the edge and send the good bits back to central command. I fear the legalese in the ToS will obscure this new way of "not collecting" user information.
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
It's probably easier to do and every bit as accurate as just using a screenshot.
And it's still exactly what I don't want them doing. There's literally zero reason for LG to be building an advertising profile on me because I was foolish enough to buy one of their TVs. This isn't something that makes their products better, it's spying.
Audio is a bit easier to turn into a fingerprint for identification vs video. Video has a lot of smaller subtle changes that happen from things like compression which make it a lot harder to identify. It's why youtube still hasn't figured out piracy, but they'll knock you immediately if you play 5 seconds of copyrighted music.
To me, it's not even about why they're doing it (building an advertising profile). I don't want them doing it at all, for any reason.
When I buy something from the store, my relationship is between me and the store, for the 30 seconds it takes for me to pay for it. I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer. I don't want to be tethered in any way to the manufacturer. I don't want to have an account with the manufacturer. I don't want the device sending anything to the manufacturer, advertising related, telemetry, or even a single bit "user has used your product." Do you get it, manufacturers?? I don't want any kind of relationship with you! I want to purchase my product and use it by myself not with you.
> I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer.
I think it depends on the device. If I buy an iPhone, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that necessarily involves a relationship with the app store provider (ie. Apple), not the store I bought the phone from.
With a TV, I suppose it depends on whether I want to install media apps like Prime Video or Netflix on it. I understand that there will be people who don't want that, in which case I agree with you. But others want to be able to run this stuff somehow, whether it's directly on the TV or via some HDMI device like a Chromecast or a Fire Stick. At that point, they _do_ want a relationship with some hardware manufacturer so that the third party app can be delivered to run on the hardware.
> If I buy an iPhone, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that necessarily involves a relationship with the app store provider (ie. Apple)
This is only true because Apple dictates it to be so. The manufacturer of the device should not have a say in what I choose to do with a device I bought. I should be able to install software on a device without asking the manufacturer for permission. Why do they think they should have an opinion? After I purchase the device, it's mine, not theirs. I can throw it off a cliff if I want without asking for Apple's permission, why can't I install software on it?
> At that point, they _do_ want a relationship with some hardware manufacturer so that the third party app can be delivered to run on the hardware.
The device manufacturer should not need to be involved with a user's decision to install software. There should not be this requirement to have a relationship with them. We should never have allowed this idea to be normalized that the device manufacturer needs to be somehow have a say, let alone be the sole path to using the device.
Device manufacturers should sell devices and then get out of the way of what the user is doing with those devices.
I mostly agree, although if the manufacturer has a catalog of software (which they have managed to check for quality, classification, etc) that you can optionally use for installing software (which others can also choose to do, e.g. in the case of Android there is also F-Droid), but that you can also install anything that you want to do by yourself (including software that you wrote by yourself) without needing to be able (or willing) to contact (or have anything further to do with) the manufacturer (for any reason), then it can be helpful.
Also, if someone provides a service (e.g. Netflix) that some might want to use and some might not, then you have the option to use that service might be helpful but even that should not require any relationship with the manufacturer unless they are also providing the service. If the manufacturer is separate then they should not have anything to do with it (e.g. they should not add a button on the remote control specific for Netflix; if they have user programmable buttons that you can add your own labels, then it would be possible to use such a thing like that if the end user decides to install Netflix). (There are other problems with Netflix too but I am ignoring them for now because that would be a separate discussion.)
When I buy a computer, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that doesn't necessitate any relationship at all with any app store provider of any sort (ie. Apple).
(When I buy a pocket supercomputer, I have that same exact expectation. It's often left unsatisfied, but I still have it.)
Then what about all the cloud enabled spyware? How would that work? (/sarcasm)
Truly though, smart-home stuff runs the whole gamut of privacy and device manufacturer relationships. eg: I have used three different smart/room AC units:
- one requires its own cloud-enabled app for any remote connectivity, no HomeKit integration
- one integrates with HomeKit but then leaves an upgrade hint that can only be done through an app with a login
- one integrates with HomeKit and pretty much just works
HomeKit then allows me to remotely control via HomePod/AppleTV acting as a router ... of course this is just a different cloud connectivity but with on-premises devices controlling other on-premises devices.
For each manufacturer of smart devices, there is potentially a separate cloud where data is being funneled through. Some devices support multiple upstreams.
I get that Matter should be a way to fix it but the reality feels more like https://xkcd.com/927/
Part of me just wants dumb devices back. Get rid of buttons on a microwave (just give me a knob for time and maybe another knob for power setting.) Remove touchscreens from cars (mine glares at me with certain sun-angles.) Bring back the desktop/computer hutch and phones that don't live in your pocket. However, having the ability to start cooling my bedroom 45 minutes before I arrive home is ... pretty compelling too.
Manufacturers just need to realize that LANs exist and allow their devices to be used with the Internet turned off.
When I'm sitting in my home and I want to turn off the AC unit in the other room or close my garage door, there's no reason I should have to do an IP roundtrip to the manufacturer's server. Both devices are on my LAN. They should just talk to each other. This has been a solved problem for decades.
I have a Vizio TV that was advertised as a Chromecast TV, and I got it because of that. It was HDMI and Chromecast only. A few years later they did a silent update that added apps and generally made the UI much slower. I mainly use it with an AppleTV or game consoles, but it still irks me that they completely changed what was in my mind a nearly perfect TV.
They realize. They hate it and wish it would go away. LAN connectivity makes it really hard to spy on you, inject ads, require subscriptions, and brick perfectly functional devices so you have to buy new ones.
I have been toying with the idea of building some kind of "home cloud" that hooks into all of your smart devices (at least all of the open devices that it can), allows photo backups from mobile devices, idk. Stuff like that.
Something you can just scan a QR code with your phone and it hooks it into your backups so your "cloud backup" is sitting in your utility room at home instead of being "someone elses computer"
Obviously this is all achievable by a savvy techie, but I'm thinking along the lines of a black box any idiot can use.
The idea is very appealing to me, I would love to decentralize "the cloud" for your average person.
And if it were possible to get one of these in every house and apartment, then the idea of a "smart home" starts to really click in ways it doesn't right now. Your smart home would have a "home cloud" box that acts as the brain
Idk. I think there's a product idea here somewhere but ultimately it's just something I'm kicking around now and then.
You only need an external server if you want to make it so the end user can access their device remotely. Otherwise, an app can very easily just scan the network for the device. Heck, the app itself could be the thing that sets up the device on the network in the first place.
Remote access should also be do-able without having a manufacturer-run server. We over-complicate things with NAT and with ISPs sabotaging inbound connections to our networks. At least with IPv6 every device on my network is addressable by the outside world, and I can (and should be allowed to) make the decision about whether they are accessible. The device manufacturer should not have to insert themselves into this conversation.
users sometimes end up with some combination of the above:
1) multiple wifi networks
2) ‘guest mode’ wifi networks (you can’t communicate to other devices on the same network)
3) various airplane mode type scenarios where they have cellular but not wifi connections semi-randomly, even on the same property/area.
these all happen with out of the box ISP setups pretty regularly, btw.
and they’ll just blame you for the flakiness.
also, for most of them, they love remote access anyway and don’t want to consider the security implications.
> There's literally zero reason for LG to be building an advertising profile on me because I was foolish enough to buy one of their TVs.
I feel like the world is bossed by people who read (well, ok listened to a 5 minute summary on a grindlife podcast at 1.5x speed) about the Trojan Horse and thought they smelled a business opporunity.
wouldn't taking screenshots in fact not always be possible depending on the content you are watching? For example netflix with their hardware level drm? (Although its their TV they possibly have ways around that with some custom hardware)
LG sits at exactly the location where screenshots are possible.
Eventually, a digital signal needs to be converted into pixels on a screen. Once that happens, it's trivial to also pipe those pixels into a screenshot.
It's the reason DRM for digital media is pretty dumb IMO. The most sophisticated DRM still has to be decoded at some point for the end user to enjoy it. It can always be broken with a camcorder (though quality suffers). However, there exists devices which decode the HDMI signal so doing a pure digital signals.
I can assure you while out sailing the high seas I have watched many Netflix titles. So their DRM is literally only there to make the experience shittier for the honest customers.
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
Wrong. They claim it doesn't record video. Recording means saving permanently - live processing is not recording. ACR is processing the video output live.
Notice what they don't say at all. ACR is just one type of spying. A completely separate feature records what you say from the microphone. They only claimed ACR doesn't do that, which we knew. They did not claim the TV doesn't do that.
This is a carefully crafted PR statement, to avoid saying any lies while making it sound like the accusation was wrong, but it does not actually say the accusation was wrong. We can infer that the likely reason it doesn't say the accusation was wrong is that the accusation is right. Instead, it says several other things, which sound like they are refuting the accusation but are actually refuting other things that nobody said.
As usual, the key to explain the discrepancy between LG's claims and the paper 2024 is in the wording. Read carefully: LG claims it "does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV.". IOW they are making the technical distinction between "fingerprinting" and "screenshots or recordings".
And specifically, they are not confirming or denying that video fingerprinting are done.
What I think is likely is, as the paper states, that they fingerprint both audio and video. Upload both to their servers. But they end up using only the audio fingerprint for ACR. In this situation, neither LG's statement, nor the paper's statement, nor the GamerNexus folks's claims are incompatible with each other.
It even makes sense from a technical standpoint: it is far easier to uniquely identify content by audio than by video, as a fingerprint of a few milliseconds of audio is pretty darn ideal, compared to fingerprinting even a single video frame which has hundreds of ways it could be compressed depending on codecs, bitrate, resolution, etc.
I can’t speak to how LG does this now but I ran an agency that built Smart TV apps and built one of the first ACR powered apps on LG about 10 years ago. We were working with a company called “Cognitive Networks” which later was bought by Vizio and is now their Inscape product. At that time one use case wasn’t just tracking but actual interactive “sync to broadcast” apps (you can still do this, no one does, and I don’t know why)
At that time during testing Cognitive could literally see what we were playing on our TV (not full video but the frames used for fingerprinting)
They don’t use Cognitive anymore for obvious reasons and there are several audio based ACR solutions but they always had issues with sections of video without much audio to work off of so we’re always considered inferior. They are fine for usage data however.
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
It apparently is.
Do you know the Nielsen Ratings? That's exactly how they know what people are watching these days. I've been contacted by them to be one of their subjects. They ship you a device that listens and recognizes based on content. They look for certain "fingerprints" in the audio and match against that - it's not capable of recording our conversations, etc (or so they claimed).
I participated once or twice a good number of years ago, and it was kind of a pain: It involved keeping a paper ledger of what was watched, and when. Correspondence was all handled by regular mail.
(As I recall, they included a small amount of cash ~every time they sent more correspondence and this was a primary motivator to keep going with it.)
It is pretty neat and several resources online explaining it but it chunks the recoding and does a hash of the fft of each frame i think which reduces the data a lot. The server has a pre hashed database https://hackernoon.com/how-shazam-works-in-a-nutshell
I know a guy who made a Shazam-like phone app that can listen to a few seconds of noisy audio and make a fingerprint that can be used to quickly ID those specific few seconds out of a pre-fingerprinted archive of an enormous amount of audio (zillions of hours of TV). Making the fingerprint requires a tiny amount of very smart code (in C with no dependencies). But, the fingerprint is not useful for understanding audio that's not in the archive.
TV shows are completed and in the can well before air date. It is entirely plausible that the interested party in having the content identifiable by Shazam like services submit whatever needs to be submitted for new content
I have also wondered about the possibility of media emitting some kind of hidden identifier. Can normal speakers emit noise outside of human hearing that could contain a unique id? Would not even need to be a lot of data that could be broadcast.
Yes, it's possible. Some sports broadcasts do this. The ones I'm familiar with use a high pitched tone on the edge of human hearing but still audible to most people.
Streaming services watermark the video as opposed to the audio as I understand it.
But that's for tracing pirated content back to the originating user account. It's not particularly useful (also entirely unnecessary and overly complicated) if your goal is to ID a piece of content as opposed to an account.
That's not necessary. If a service has access to the raw audio of a show, it can fingerprint each second of that audio in a way that can be matched in a tiny amount of computation even for a recording in a noisy environment.
That can't recognize what you say. But, it can ID where you are in a specific show out of zillions of hours of shows.
nielsen's ACR method is embedded into millions of devices and vendors. No need for a microphone, it's processing the audio signal being sent out. A microphone would be a wasted conversion..
(your car infotainment also likely has nielsen tech in it most likely, as they bought arbitron and gracenote)
Nielsen is global Company that is used for pricing ads on TV stations around the world. Their way of doing it from what I know personally is that they sign up people to put this ACR boxes voluntarily and then based on extrapolation of data - they can tell you pretty close what was the viewership across demographics. Similar to how election polls are done - you just need a good sample.
As far as I know, watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization. Nielsen researched and developed ACR technology but it never required watermarks.
When Nielsen first started collecting data (1950s), they handed out diaries to a group of around 5 000 selected households. Nielsen would then collect these diaries and extrapolate viewing patterns across the entire population.
After that came phone surveys. Next step (1980s) was the "people meter", a small box attached to the TV that could automatically detect which channel was tuned and which household members were in the room.
In the 1990s the set-top box made all of that redundant as the cable and satellite providers could directly see which channel every single box was tuned to at all times.
> watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization
Both audio (sports) and video (netflix et al) watermarks are alive and well. They are used to trace piracy (ie account ID), not for content ID (at least AFAIK).
Broadcasters: the cutting edge of streaming information is ours! Now let's make it so everyone unknowingly broadcasts as much info back to us as possible!
Regardless of it being how it always was done, such a finger print can easily be injected into LG's advertising ecosystem to infer everything about your demographic and what your interests and income might be and hit you with more specialized ads.
What we watch is not OK to be fed ads, especially if I wasn't using their service to being with and its monitoring the audio from any input to do this.
In this way, smart tvs and smart home devices are effectively hostile devices behind your router at home.
Yes. It’s also horrible that they have microphones in your home listening to your conversations. LG knowing what I’m watching is awful, but it seems even worse for LG to listen in to the conversation I have with my loved ones about it after. I don’t want to be under surveillance in my own home.
Does it matter? Whether they are doing it on device or in the cloud, they are still recording what their customers say and collecting data on it without their consent.
FWIW, LG will connect to a public DNS and use encryption so a basic PiHole list doesn't help unless you combine it with firewall rules. See the caveats section of that Github link.
Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that. No one reads the ToS anyway. Just stop buying TVs, now that Sceptre stopped delivering the last models of consumer dumb TVs.
The thing which depresses me the most is all these so-called smart TV's are giant Arm computers that run malicious software. Imagine if we could re-flash your TV with Linux or whatever.
I can imagine that. We'd have a slow SBC with a fast video decoder, a huge screen that is inseparable and also now uncalibrated, some video inputs for other things, maybe a tuner if anyone can figure it out, and some kind of network connectivity.
I could probably come up with a use for that, but it's about as likely as coming up with a plan for one of the Raspberry Pi Zero Ws that are sitting in the drawer.
From reading other responses, it seems there is an assumption the image itself is fingerprinted. The digital content is encoded, there is essentially a barcode on your TV screen with lines running horizontally that you cannot see with the human eye. The encoding is picked up as the signal, it does not need to see or recognize if that is your favorite actress on the screen.
In what way? Dramatically lower processing and signature complexity. Audio signature matching is trivial and extremely well known. I see absolutely nothing implausible about this, and it seems a robust, viable solution.
> This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification.
That paper found no such thing. That paper actually demonstrated that they have no clue how the ACR happened, they just demonstrated that playing content yielded content IDs. It is more likely they were witnessing audio ACR happening, exactly as LG described.
After doing some investigation into my Bang Olufsen after some tech not working right apparently Dev mode on it allows "Most probable raw grab: ThinQ/SSAP on the LAN after pairing — ~960×540 JPEG. Live Plus/ACR: most probably sends a fingerprint, not a retrievable raw frame."
"Everything" would include the microphone, both in the remote and the TV. They're claiming to split off the audio, with one path going to the speakers (and there to your ears), and the other path being hashed (and from there to LG).
They still claim to get your media's audio, but deny using the microphones.
If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? It says the TV owner is "solely responsible" for obtaining all necessary consents from third parties whose voices may be recorded by the device, and must warn household members and guests that their voices may be recorded, and if someone does not agree, the TV's microphone and voice functions need to be turned off. [0]
> If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV?
1. The introduction says that Smart TVs are not included in this ToS ("not including Smart TVs").
2. Where do the terms say anything about "sensitive" content? The closest thing I see is section 4.d, but that's just about wiretapping/privacy laws in general.
They explicitly state that the audio ACR is done through the "TV’s internal audio processor". e.g. rendered audio, not recorded audio. I mean, you could stretch the claim to have it internal include recorded audio, but that seems dubious.
Because when people cry wolf, and then there is no wolf, it actually harms the consumer by lowering everyone's guard. Have people not learned this yet?
Gamers Nexus discovered recently, through their "AMD blacklisting" bit (when some relatively minor mid-lifecycle refresh of a product they didn't get a demo unit, so it turned into some "we are the truthsayers!" bit), that doing the Louis Rossmann routine earns them loads of links and clicks. So they're firmly in the cry wolf territory now, and it makes me more dubious of their claims that the people they are questioning.
This whole space is filled with bullshit now. Saw another video where a big channel talks about why TVs are so cheap now, and they then explain it that it's because they sell your data. In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
I agree with you that accusations need to be backed by proofs and the kneejerk reactions on HN are embarrassing to read and unhelpful. Big bad evil corp, every single time. I mean those reactions are all over social media, but I just expected a little bit less knee jerk from HN.
> In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
Unfortunately that part if your comment is provably false in at least one instance: Vizio. It's a shame, I thought we were on the same page about spreading half truths.
Vizio's numbers are famously public due to its recent sale. We know they lost money on most televisions sold (not all!), and they made it up in ad revenue and content distribution from those TVs. It doesn't prove that LG loses money on its TVs, but it's clearly not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
> Vizio's numbers are famously public due to its recent sale.
Vizio's numbers were public because they went public in 2021 and like every public corporation they have to report numbers. The sale to Walmart actually made their numbers private again because while they're a part of public company still, it's now thoroughly washed in such a mass of numbers it disappears in any quantifiable way.
> It doesn't prove that LG loses money on its TVs, but it's clearly not as clear cut as you make it out to be
How clear cut do you think I made it? You seem to be claiming my comment said something it didn't.
TVs are being subsidized by secondary businesses for some vendors, to some degree, but that isn't why TVs are cheap. If you completely removed that factor, some makers would be slightly more expensive...but not by that much at all.
Like people do a lot of clever positioning to grossly overstate how much they make from this. And it's worth noting that much if not most of the revenue people ascribe to "ads" or privacy invasion on Vizio, actually came from their Connected+ platform. Vizio had a platform, just like Apple does, and just like Apple they took a cut of every subscription signed up for, or piece of media purchased.
I remember back in the day when laptops had a bunch of pre-installed junk and stupid stickers all over them -- at least in the Windows world -- and people would claim this "subsidized" the laptop. That it made it much less expensive. Some people ran the numbers and it was utterly marginal, but they did it because the average person simply didn't care. If they just increased the price the tiny amount and removed that shit the product would be better, but if most people don't care and you can eek out a tiny bit more, they do it.
Note that their statement could also be true if they record 99% of the time. We need to start calling companies out for meaningless weasel statements like "We don't record continuously".
The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record. Putting a remote control listening hardware on a device that runs a plethora of 3rd party apps and with full connection to the internet means that even if LG isn't controlling that mic, someone else will be.
Enough with the knee jerk reactions. They have to record in some cases. You don't have to like those features, but plenty of people want those features.
- The television has voice control.
- The television has a manually triggered speech-to-text feature so you don't have to type with tv remote.
You simply do not say something like “we don’t record continuously” if the reality is that you only record when voice control or speech to text is active. Given the entire industry’s track record, the only sane thing to do when confronted with weasel wording is to assume the truth is the worst possible interpretation that isn’t a blatant lie, and even then, sometimes it is just a blatant lie.
Here’s some examples:
- We don’t record continuously -> We record nearly all the time, only stopping to upload the recording.
- We do not sell your data -> But we do “share” it.
- All your data is protected from unauthorized LLM scraping -> But we define all the big tech companies as authorized scraping.
There are lots of good reasons that are used to paper over the abuse cases.
Microphones in tvs are a useful accessibility feature when they enable voice commands for the user, and allow them to be used as voice assistants.
They also enable tvs with a camera and microphone to be used as video calling or audio calling interfaces. Used well we get star Trek view screens, used poorly we get little brother monitoring.
For those interested, it turns the tv into an interactive terminal for voice and camera powered video games, which are becoming more popular.
Unfortunately advertising and tracking incentives drive the abuse cases to the top and will crush the positive use cases :(
Like I do with laptops, just snip wires (or pull out header/connector) to microphone and camera. Problem partly solved.
Fully solve it by disconnecting network cable/Wi-Fi so there's no internet.
For me a TV set only receives FTA signals and has connectors for local media/AV input. It ceases to be a TV set when it starts doing what my PCs and laptops do.
(Anonymity is the reason why FTA broadcasting is still so very important, by design it's only one-way — broadcaster to listener/viewer. Unfortunately smart TVs and the internet subvert anonymity by design.)
There's no practical reason for most people. Spying is the primary function. Edge cases like accessibility or conferencing can be easily enabled with an add on USB mic. You'd need a USB webcam with mic for conferencing anyway.
People use voice commands on TV remotes all the time if they're using streaming apps. At this point it's the default way to interact with the UI for many people.
Typing out the show you're searching for with an awkward onscreen keyboard is a huge pain compared to just clicking a button and speaking.
HN users are very much in a bubble if it's surprising to learn consumers expect voice control functionality on a new TV.
"HN users are very much in a bubble if it's surprising if it's learn consumers expect voice control functionality on a new TV."
Perhaps a few are unaware but most know. As I said in my post, some (like me) only want traditional FTA — and with it comes anonymity by default.
Smart TVs undermine and subvert the virtues of FDA services. It should be mandated that it's possible for modern smart TVs to switch to FTA-only mode if viewers so desire. Similarly, regulation should ensure that dumb TVs always be available for those who want them.
Accessibility is not an edge case. Every single human being who lives long enough will experience some form of accessibity challenge, either for themselves or for others around them.
You can dismiss the lives experience of most humans over the history of humanity, but it won't win you any arguments.
You'd be looking for what's now called a "dumb tv". But those are getting rare, because TVs that can't sell your watch data have to be more expensive to make up for that, and that doesn't sell. Commercial screens are an option, as are computer monitors. Or getting a smart tv and never connecting it to the internet. So far nobody has started shipping TVs with a mobile connection to exfiltrate data, as far as we know. Unlike cars.
> So far nobody has started shipping TVs with a mobile connection to exfiltrate data, as far as we know
Yeah, I suspect that it either isn't a big enough segment of the market to make the costs worth it, or they just haven't been caught. Given that it's pretty easy to add amazon sidewalk connectivity to devices with bluetooth radios (which most of these TVs have to support external wireless speakers), I'd be shocked if they hadn't at least experimented and estimated payoff on doing that.
There are plans to build these networks at various stages. Putatively to enable connectivity, but in practice the tech creates a device to device mesh network that enables side channel communication over a secure mechanism that is not necessarily subject to use control.
"…as long as you're satisfied with the factory installed firmware version."
Why wouldn't one be? Not that long ago 'dumb' TVs never even had firmware (and that was the situation throughout most of television history). Allowing a manufacturer to update TV firmware online is dangerous and foolhardy. (Same reasons why I never let any of my printers go anywhere near the internet—any driver software is always blocked by a firewall.)
Voice recognition is really useful when searching. It's annoying to type with a TV remote. Also you can just say what you want like "play breaking bad on Netflix" and it'll just do it.
Edit: also the mic in the remote has a function to calibrate the speakers to the room (correcting for the impulse response of the room basically) which can make the audio much better.
Since you're using it for Netflix, etc I assume it has unrestricted Internet access. With that and microphone access, you're giving tacit permission to capture and upload basically whatever it wants, to whoever it wants.
That seems unwise, no matter how helpful the features are.
Many common SOC's MediaTek, Realtek, and Broadcom SOC's quite often used modern audio capable devices analog pins can be software defined either input or output.
IIRC I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room. Audio quality wasn't perfect, but it making sense what was spoken was good enough.
"…I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room."
Users need to know the electrical features of their H/W and its limits. If a loudspeaker output stage is designed (hardware wired) so that it can never act as an input then no later firmware update can turn the speaker into a microphone.
This is why hardware authentication is becoming more and more important.
Orwell's 80 years ahead of his time. The great unwashed who watch Netflix etc. either don't know or don't care that they're mirroring the closing moments of the book.
The warning has been there for 80 years and still most are unaware. When Vespasian built the Colosseum it was to help rule over the unruly. Netflix and ilk are its modern incarnation.
> The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record.
Exactly, and recent announcements like Apple normalising always on recording, even wrapped in “big promises” on privacy, deserve a lot more attention and strong regulation.
> Features such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional. These features are not enabled by default. Users can choose to enable these features and can manage or withdraw consent through TV settings.
They may be optional features but I’m pretty sure when I set up my tv and got to the screen where you are required to agree to the various terms and privacy legalese the “happy path” was to hit the “accept all” button vs use the remote to navigate into each one, read, and only activate the few required to use the tv. I would not call this dark pattern “optional” by default.
Even some updates will trigger the acceptance screen from time to time, with a second scare confirmation shown when I reject. If my wife or kids were shown that screen when I’m not around they would accept it.
Why would anyone connect their TV to the Internet? It’s been known for years that it spies, although maybe not to this extent. Or are these TVs auto connecting open WiFi or the neighbor’s Xfinity WiFi?
The vast majority of consumers are not going to spend another $100-300 on a media player device like an Apple TV, Roku, or nVidia shield. They will use the built in app functionality.
And even those who don't - a very surprising to me number people use the "free channels" most TVs ship with. It's like the streaming version of broadcast OTA I guess for a certain consumer segment.
They say these features are opt-in and they reject dark patterns, but in my experience setting up LG TVs, everything was opt-in and I had to manually hunt through all the menus to turn this stuff off.
Their statements don’t align with the reality I’ve experienced as a customer. My TV is not connected to the network, because the setup process left me with 0 trust that LG wouldn’t be collecting information regardless of my settings, or that I didn’t miss something. There was also the risk that they’d add a new “feature” with an update which would I’d be automatically opted in to.
Until they start selling truly dumb TVs, I’m not going to trust anything and their statements fall flat.
I probably should have said "everything was already enabled"... Opt-in/out was on the mind, and neither seemed like the right wording to convey that the choice was already made for me in the wrong direction.... I was opted in automatically.
If the checkbox is already ticked it is called opt-out. You have to toggle the checkbox to not be activated. The other way around is opt-in. The checkbox is empty and if you want to enable it you have to take action.
I would argue there is a very clear unambiguously correct choice of wording for that case. The setting was opt out. It's a binary concept and which case it's in is determined by the default given no user action. If it is opt in, then it is off by default and you have to make the choice to turn it on. If it is opt out, it is on by default and you have to make the choice to turn it off. If it was enabled automatically it is opt out. There's no need to complicate the meaning of terminology with a straightforward definition. Given you don't take active action, that you accept all defaults and take the path of least resistance, is it enabled or disabled by default? That's all that matters.
It was enabled when you accepted the terms and conditions when you first turned it on, or did a firmware update. LGs statment says this:
> ACR is an optional feature that is turned off by default. To enable ACR, a user must accept LG’s Viewing Information Agreement, which describes how ACR works.
Which I take to mean that when you agree to the terms, it enables the feature.
At 5:58 of the Gamers Nexus (GN) video about LG TV's spying, GN make a statement:
Now, our lawyers have made the totally unrelated point uh that we cannot legally agree to contracts such as terms of service or conditions while incredibly innebriated.
So they drank a lot of margaritas while video-recording the section concerning reading and accepting the Terms of Service for the TV.
I don't think that would hold up in any court in the world. While sober, and in coordination with legal counsel, they made a plan to accept the terms and conditions. That's like a kid swinging their arms around on a playground while saying "I'm not touching you" levels.
I assume that part was for entertainment, this wouldn't fly in court. But they also show the dark patterns used to make you consent to it, and how certain features seem unaffected by these choices or send one last request when revoking consent.
I personally would not trust legal advice from YouTubers who make money from whatever "content" generates the most views. The more outrageous and controversial the better, making sense or being true a distant secondary priority. Even those who make a name for themselves as trustworthy tend to eventually succomb to the incentives of the algorithm if it's their day job.
If the user needs to accept the viewing agreement to get through the initial setup, and agreement enables those features, then it's an opt-out feature, not an opt-in feature.
The only alternative would be to not accept the agreement and return the TV to the store, because there would be no way to go through the setup and actually use the TV.
I can't remember if this agreement was forced during the last setup I did, but most of these agreements are forced. There is no way to not check a box and still use the device with the desired featured turned off out of the gate.
Maybe they technically have it opt-out, but from a user perspective, that's not the experience. This is a dark pattern and their framing around this solidifies that I will never buy another LG product.
It also gates some "features" like the "AI" auto-detection of media type to automatically switch the TV between sports, movie, gaming, etc. modes as well. At least from my memory of a recent LG OLED setup.
Based on the section on gamersnexus, they use dark patterns to get you to agree. They show a bunch of user agreements to you all at once and auto select the “accept all” button to get your tv working. They hide the optional agreements for spying amongst all the other ones you need to agree to to make the tv work. Most people probably don’t realise you can turn off the checkbox which gives permission to have your tv spy on you.
Yesterday I saw a comment that say that some info collecting was "opt-in by default" and I imagined it was an evil conspiracy f corporations to dilute the name. I just looked for the comment, but it was just another case of error while writing the comment.
Anyway, last year my phone died and I bought a new one made by Samsung. I had to opt out of collection like 4 or 5 times with confusing buttons, and there is a lot of crapware installed by default, and then the phone offered to install two additional apps. I almost sure I said no, but one of them got installed anyway.
For like a decade, the "opt-in" to ACR was included in the ToS agreement needed to use any smart features. Then at least some brands made the opt-in separate, but made it look like a recommendation engine or "help us improve your experience" agreement.
LG adopted the "Maybe Later" dark pattern for opt-in to ACR, at least in some markets. Though I guess you never know for sure with A/B testing.
> "LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as 'Hi LG' is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature."
> LG went on to say that beyond the aforementioned instances, "the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations."
LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
I think the main questions are:
1. Is it fully supported to use LG TVs disconnected from the internet.
2. Are wake word voice controls and ACR truly opt-in. They claim it is in the statement but (as others have mentioned) I remain skeptical what definition of “opt-in” they are using.
Update: some of this is becoming a semantic discussion on the definitions of “recording” and “collecting”, but to circumvent this I would say:
If a device can detect words in my ambient conversations and depending on what it detects (accurate or not) it can send that audio to the cloud, I would describe that device as “collecting or recording ambient conversations”
LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
I don't know how LG TVs do it, but e.g. many smartphones use a dedicated ASIC/audio processing chip that does not really record anything, but specifically listens for the wake word and discards all other audio to save power/battery life. I think this distinction is relevant, because there is a huge privacy difference between streaming a live audio stream to the cloud to detect a wake word and a specialized audio processor that has a small buffer only for detecting the wake word, where the audio does not leave that processor.
Theoretically, you could call that few-second buffer recording, but I don't think that would be collecting/recording ambient conversations to most people, since it's ephemeral and does not leave your device.
The question, of course, is what happens in LG TVs.
Fair points, but if a device can detect words in my ambient conversations and depending on what it detects (accurate or not) it can send that audio to the cloud, I would describe that device as “collecting or recording ambient conversations”
I think that was only done back when the processing power needed was relatively high, or for power constrained devices. I'd be really surprised if they do that for a smart TV.
>LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
No, it's arguably accurate because "record" implies it's being persisted. Otherwise something as simple as a sound meter (which needs a microphone to operate) is "recording".
> In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
There's a risk here that we will talk-past one another while using different meanings of the same words, so let me offer a scenario:
AcmeTV has an isolated component which taps microphone input, records to a 5-second ring buffer, and on "Wakey-Wakey" triggers an alert flag. Assume it works perfectly accurately.
Would you accuse AcmeTV of "recording or collecting ambient conversations" on the basis of that component constantly reading microphone data?
Personally I wouldn't, because it's not the same kind of "recording" we consumers are concerned about.
Human wake word recognition isn't infallible, either. How often in your life did you respond because you thought somebody called your name and it wasn't actually the case?
I wrote that in to deter kinda-bad-faith responses, where someone tries to play at being an evil-genie, inserting unreasonable flaws into the gaps, like: "But what if it triggered all the time? On purpose!?"
The point is that ethical implementations do exist, and them working does not rely on anything close to perfection--so nitpicking that word isn't helpful.
Point taken. Let’s focus on the “ethical implementations do exist” part though. Let’s say a best possible implementation has 99% specificity. Then if it detects audio that has nothing to do with “LG” it mistakenly treats it as LG relevant 1% of the time. So if audio in my living room is 100x more likely to not be relevant for LG, then half of the audio data LG is receiving is not relevant. So what would an ethical specificity be? And what is actual state of the art?
Later, AcmeTV has a 1MB lookup table of wake words that can be updated OTA. Whenever a wake word is detected, it triggers an alert flag with the device id, word id, and timestamp, and then broadcasts it out as high-frequency sound through the speakers.
Nearby, another AcmeTV or business partner device picks up the sound and sends it to AcmeHQ.
The former device "never transmits your viewing behavior to Acme".
The latter device "never records your viewing behavior".
I endorse the cynicism, but I feel that's moving the goalposts a tad, from "good is impossible" to "good is improbable".
Or, in a heavily-paraphrased nutshell:
Politician: "Watch-words are ALWAYS evil-mode. They have to be lying."
Terr: "No. Here's a watch-word which would be good-mode."
Politician: "Well, it'll still *become* evil-mode, eventually."
Plus, if you keep expanding the scope for definitions of objectionable behavior like "recording", you'll quickly reach a point where it would basically apply to any SoC made in the last decade attached to a microphone/speaker. Thus watering down labels to the point of meaninglessness.
Which actually makes it easier for a future EvilTVCorp to get away with recording your conversations 24/7 in MP3 files sent to their server if cynical consumers assume every TV records you anyway, so what's the difference?
I don't know how LG is doing it, but I suspect that they are taking the same approach for wakewords as Alexa does/did. When I worked for Alexa, it was public knowledge that we used relatively inexpensive and low power chips dedicated to wakeword detection, and those would wake up the main chips if they believed that they heard the wakeword. To my understanding, we did this because doing cloud-based wakeword detection was considered incredibly expensive and wasteful, and there are vendors with pretty decent and inexpensive wake word detection chips.
Then, when the system was more awake, it would attempt to figure out whether the wakeword was real or not (e.g. sometimes certain words and word pairs have a very similar sonic signature to 'Alexa'), and if it felt confident enough then it would begin streaming audio to the back end for significantly improved voice recognition.
Since Amazon took (and as far as I know still takes) voice privacy incredibly seriously, voice recordings and data were treated as essentially radioactive waste, deleted as soon as legally possible, and secured against even internal Alexa developer access.
I personally don't have the same level of confidence in security with LG, who seem to think they don't have as much to lose as far as customer trust goes and might as well exploit the heck out of the systems they have. I suspect that problem, which Amazon has so far pretty successfully avoided for the most part, is self-correcting over time.
Look I know it's easy to believe these things when your paycheck depends upon it, god knows I've convinced myself of a convenient fact or two when it was necessary for me to get through the day. But afterwards, without a financial interest, you owe it to yourself to go back and think about it again.
Fuck that. Dystopian shit with people yelling brand names in their homes.
Edit: I forgot people already be yelling Alexa/Siri/Google. I can't imagine a future when you have to yell to each brand in your home. "Hey Sony, turn on the PS7. LG what's on the fridge? Samsung, start the cycle in the dishwasher".
"We own the glass" that's what really stood out to me. I can still disconnect my TV from wifi. But what scares me is when every device comes with their own esim and cellular radio.
You shouldn't be really scared until all devices follow the pattern of the iPhone (and maybe new flagship Android phones too, I'm not in that camp).
New iPhones are expensive, more than $1000. Yet most people who get them finance it through their cellular carrier, usually 2 year plans, so it's just $30-$50 tacked on to the monthly cellphone bill. So ... no one cares unless it's going to double their bill.
Let's say the RAMopocalypse and other AI-driven chip pressues drives everything up even more; let's say now-cheap TVs are now $2000 or $3000. No biggie. Your cellphone company can offer you an eSIM-locked TV with bundled network and services, on a 5 year plan with free lifetime service and replacement, adding just $30-$40 to your bill for 5 years. Maybe it will include something like Family Tracker Life360 Intercom as a value-add - talk to your children to/from the TV to/from any phone on your plan, anywhere, anytime. Safety, etc.
Same thing with your laptop, home IoT/security devices, etc.
If ATSC 3.0 dies and gives way to 5g Broadcast, it'll be another enabler for something like this.
When you buy a BIC pen, you own all content created with that pen, not BIC. This needs to be applied to all other tools; computers, TVs, AI agents, ...
With out the user the content would have never been created. Users are the content creates and now the push to remove their owners ship of their actions and move it to the wealthy.
ACR is "not enabled by default"? Is this actually true or is it one of those weasley technicalities where the tv ships with it turned off, but once you connect the tv to the internet it turns on?
Technically when you turn the TV on for the first time, ACR is not enabled. Ergo, not enabled by default.
Sure, to use the TV you need to go past the EULA screen. And the button right in front of you, pre-selected - is agree to all terms. And after pressing OK, you now have ACR turned on. But you did that, it wasn't on by default.
Okay I can take my soul sucking corporate hat off now.
Its looks like the sort of stuff that happens to a tragic fantasy hero after a Faustian deal. Except they would've asked for riches, love or eternal youth, we on the other hand just want our middling-quality tv to work.
Sure, to use the TV you need to go past the EULA screen.
And that's where the problem is.
TVs should be TVs. Phones should be phones. Cars should be cars. If the manufacturers can't help themselves adding other stuff that is for their own benefit and not the product owner's and some of it so bad that it needs legal weasel words to CTA and competition in the market is insufficient to kill these practices off then it's time for heavy-handed regulation.
Maybe we say you can't sell any product in these categories in our country with any remote connectivity at all except for specifically permitted uses. Maybe the penalty for wilful violation is a warning with a big fine. Maybe the penalty for repeated wilful violation is fines that are an existential threat to the business and personally barring the corporate executives from holding corporate office for the next five years. That kind of thing.
On LG TVs there are about 5 separate agreements you need to accept. You dont need to accept them all to use the tv, but in the initial setup LG puts a handy 'Accept All' button front and center, which agrees to all 5 incrluding the unnecessary ones and turns on the ACR feature. This is the dark pattern most people are pissed about.
But again the real question is why a TV should need users to accept any kind of post-sale agreement at all to be used normally (meaning "as reasonably expected and/or explicitly advertised").
Maybe the simplest solution is to pass a consumer protection law that completely nullifies any such post-sale agreements and makes pre-sale agreements enforceable only if they have massive prominence and standardised warnings on the packaging like the ones we require here in England on tobacco products. Then everyone can just use the regular tech security and privacy laws against any company that is spying on its customers or compromising their home networks without consent - which would probably be any company that operated this kind of scheme at all because I doubt many manufacturers would want to print "WARNING: USING THIS PRODUCT DAMAGES THE SECURITY AND PRIVACY OF YOUR HOME AND DEVICES" in six inch high lettering on their boxes.
I'm no lawyer, but afaik so-called "shrink-wrap" licence agreements, where vendor would like people to believe you've agreed by buying & using the product, are null & void legally speaking. Primarily because there's no way to say "no" before unboxing the product.
It's okay to ASK for permissions afterwards, if user can decline. But if such permissions are required to use the device normally, then the proper course of action is decline, if product then fails to do its job, take it back to store as broken & demand money back (no, coupons won't do!). Any seller refusing at that point would have a hard time avoiding legal repercussions should you decide to pursue it.
That is: in countries with reasonable consumer protection laws (like EU).
They at least use a pattern where you need to accept terms of use & privacy policy when you download an app. Same screen has option to accept other agreements like ACR. However by default "select all" option is highlighted so people will often click that.
Slightly earlier on video they state that certain ad related things got turned on automatically during software updates.
Why don’t you read LG’s actual statement, which states that it “requires separate explicit user opt-in consent and can be disabled at any time through the TV settings.”
Remember that one time when music CDs from Sony MBG installed a rootkit on your PC that continuously sent whatever MP3s you had on your PC back to them?
Yep and they were fined a paltry 6 million dollars or so. For actively distributing and infecting users with malware. This on annual sales exceeding $3B.
That case sure put Mark Russinovich on everyone’s radars, at least.
As the saying goes, this is what radicalized me. If any one of us did anything close to this we would be treated like Aaron Swartz and given a 35+ year prison sentence.
But in the Sony case the DOJ didn't even threaten criminal charges.
> "LG also said that its features like “Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional,” and “not enabled by default.”
I am absolutely certain that ACR was enabled on our new TV by default, back some years ago. I am nearly certain their voice recognition, and advertising spying were enabled on our TV by default.
If none of this is truly "enabled by default" then this is a recent development.
I discovered this many years ago and did some deep dives, and unfortunately didn't publish anything about it. Lesson learned.
It is not enabled by default, but conveniently it's toggled on if you accept the ACR terms of service - including if you select "agree to all" - during TV setup and/or when downloading or updating any apps.
A few months ago, my Roku TV started displaying these weird popups, saying something like, "Looks like you're watching college basketball. Did you know Roku-TV also has college basketball?" - something like that. Well, for the Roku device, yes, there was a setting I could disable, but (1) Roku pushed this 'feature' and made it default without my knowledge/consent, and (2) the config setting says the popups will stop, but it doesn't mention the data collection; my assumption is they're still collecting that data for their own data analytics purposes.
Pretty much the exact reason I stopped using Roku. I bought a streaming device to stream, but apparently roku decided selling devices wasn't lucrative enough so they started selling ads instead.
I really wish there was a better way to do a media center linux.
I've one question: I've used android phone (realme, which is chinese). And i remember that whenever we used to discuss somethings among our friends, i started used to get ads realated to that on my laptop, phone within atmost a hour.
So, was realme transcribing all conversations and uploading it? Can someone answer?
Wired wrote an article in 2017 [1] on whether it's possible/probable to do that. Technology has evolved a lot since then, so it's a lot more feasible, but the article describes how far metadata alone can go.
For example, let's say an ad network knows your and your friends' location, and knows you've met because you've been close together frequently, or are using the same wifi network. You talk about perfumes, then later one of them looks up perfumes on their phone. Google would usually have access to this much metadata, and will likely serve you perfume ads because of your friend who later looked it up.
This doesn't directly answer your question though. The answer would be - it's possible, but a lot is possible without that.
I don't know, but I suspect the battery drain would be substantial. I wonder if there is a different explanation: maybe one of your friends searched for information on the topic while you were on the same hotspot/in the same location and that (along with existing relationship graphs?) allowed them to target you? That's how I'd do it, I think.
There is a real possibility that either something you saw triggered the conversation and/or that you remember the ad because you spoke about it. It’s enough to linger on an ad for the platform to recognize your interest and serve you more ads like it.
It's technically possible but very unlikely. Running TTS continuously is a big battery drain and slows down the rest of the phone while you're using it. Google has a live TTS service for hearing impaired which I've run for a while to test it, and even with it practically built into the OS it's sucking up battery like you'd expect it to.
It's more likely that this is all due to external forces. Having your device on the same network, in close enough proximity to detect each other, for instance, combined with one of your friends having Googled the stuff you were talking about.
Or just basic data collection. There's the classic story about how supermarkets know you're pregnant before you do, just based on the groceries you buy (no, not pregnancy tests). Ad networks buy and collect a humongous amount of information about everyone and serve ultra specific targeted ads based on nothing more than pattern matching based on what the rest of humanity is doing.
It's impossible to rule out that the thing did run a 24/7 TTS service, but I think the depressing fact that ad networks don't need to listen to our conversations to know what we're talking about is more probable.
You don't need monitoring for that to work. Just something like "Hey, Google". The device knows a bunch of keywords and when it hears them it's bingo. As long as your laptop and phone are logged into the same local network with the same public IP they'll get the same ads.
And your phone most likely already listens all the time to catch an "Hey, Google" (or something similar).
I think, sadly, I'm becoming immune to slop because I (till now) believed I'm good at reading through LLM junk and that read quite normally to me. How annoying. My apologies.
I think the disappointing reality is that those ad networks have enough access to the content of your attention (and therefore what you talk to your friends about) that the technical cost and risk of surreptitious audio monitoring just isn't necessary.
People always dismiss this as FUD but it's been happening to me more than ever. I know in many cases it is more likely that firms are acquiring purchase histories and location data but that doesn't explain other incidents.
For example, last week I was complaining to my spouse about shoulder pain and how I was afraid I may need another surgery. YouTube has suddenly starting flooding my feed with videos about "shoulder exercises to avoid surgery." I hadn't searched any of those terms, purchased anything or visited an orthopedic, so I don't know what else could possibly explain it.
It could have been something as simple as lingering on some kind of content related to physical therapy on a social media feed before scrolling past it, or maybe your wife googled it and it got correlated via network?
If you live in the United States you should find out who your state senator and representative are and write a letter to them asking them to propose, and support legislation prohibiting spying and increasing consumer privacy protection.
Kentucky passed HB 692 unanimously requiring smart TVs to ask permission if they are going to be spying on us. Ask your state legislature to follow their lead and pass some very popular consumer privacy protection.
“LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as 'Hi LG' is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature."
The definition of “process” is really important and is missing. LG could process all
transcripts on their servers too and stay within a very wonky definition of “process” on the TV that excludes transcription and transmission.
This document isn't terribly easy to understand by the standards of traditional TV's. You have to pay close attention to figure out what is and isn't going on, and when. It also should have been taped to the front of every LG TV when it comes out of the box.
User Choice:
There is extensive explanation of how what LG TV's are doing isn't nefarious, but the fact remains that there's no switch to turn it off. Why not just put a simple hardware on/off switch on these TV"s to turn off all connectivity? Maybe some users want dumb TV's, or maybe they just don't want to worry about all of this.
Informed Consent:
Buyers apparently consented to this at the store. Now you're finally informing them. That's now how informed consent works.
Continuous Improvement:
I'll believe LG and other Smart TV manufacturers are serious about this when they add a hardware wifi on/off switch, and not a moment before.
Instead, I connect a Google TV Streamer, as I'm in the Google ecosystem. For my friends in the Apple ecosystem, I tell them to do the same with an Apple TV box.
This is the way. My TV tries its hardest to get me to connect and whenever I turn it on, it doesn’t fail to remind me that I’ve disabled the microphone and that I should turn it back on. But as soon as the Apple TV takes over all is good.
The only reason TV’s are getting cheaper is the business model changed. Now your viewing data (and perhaps conversations) are part of their product offering.
OLED productions costs have fallen, and the yields have gotten better — displays of all kinds have gotten cheaper, not just TVs; OLEDs have started showing up in products they haven’t before for cost reasons, etc.
The manufacturers make some profit on the data they harvest, sure; but the biggest BOM costs of TVs have definitely also dropped sharply.
It's probably mixed. I think Vizio's financial statements suggest they lose money on TVs and make it up on user data, but I'm not sure this holds for other manufacturers. I agree with you that TVs have gotten much cheaper to make, which probably incentivized the "collect it all" mentality, since their reach has increased and they can target more customers with lower prices.
When they spend 400 on a tv and sell it for 410 and sell the data for 40 it doesn’t mean the data makes 4 times as much as the tv. The cost of gathering that data is still 400, they have nothing to sell without spending 409 in the hardware.
It seems conditions are such that the TV selling business is worthless (i.e. unprofitable) without collecting the data, and the TV data collection business can't work without selling TVs.
I don't need the TV to be cheaper. I can afford to make up the difference for whatever few hundred dollars extra they would earn selling my data. But the expensive ones do this stuff, too.
So what you're saying is you're more valuable to advertisers . . . which means the amount you are worth to them grows with the amount you'd spend to avoid them.
Unless this stuff is made literally illegal they will keep doing it, because it's far more profitable than the alternatives. This is precisely why ideas like paying for a privacy respecting option on Facebook could never work.
I recently solved this problem by buying the Dell U5226KW. It has the same height as a 16:9 42" TV, but is 21:9, so a lot wider. It costs about four times as much as a similar sized 16:9 TV and you can't get it any bigger.
LG TVs boot Linux and have plenty of capabilities. Why would they not ... take a look around at the environment ... to best enhance ... your errr experience.
LG are amongst equals here. I've seen devices (TVs/cameras) do ping sweeps and then port scans.
I have two VLANs at home: THINGS for IoT and SEWER for things that look really dodgy.
I drive a (Seic) MG4 EV. I use the Home Assistant integration for that and put up with the rest. To be fair I live in the UK and we are quite efficiently ... observed.
A quixotic legal dream: All consumer data-surveillance must take the form of an opt-in monthly payment plan, which either side can cancel.
So the TV gets advertised as "$$$, but basically $$ if you sign up to be surveilled and get a $/month check back." If the company sets $/month too low--or is too creepy about what they collect--people just won't opt-in.
But what happens if they promise big pay-backs but routinely cancel from their side? That's a problem, but at least it's a kind the market [0] can handle when it comes to reputation and bad reviews.
[0] "Markets are good, use them." -- "OK, fine, you must price this on a market." -- "NOT LIKE THAT!"
For practical fixes, consider replacing the TV with a “commercial monitor” and connecting an Apple TV device instead (or an open source thingy).
Disconnecting “smart tv” from internet to use Apple TV is possible and might work, but you will get nagged to reconnect all the time. And TV mfr will eventually try to find workarounds - purchase access to wireless connections from large-footprint connectivity providers (Xfinity WIFI, 4g/5g networks, etc) or create a p2p network among their own connected devices. I doubt they do it right now as it’s less profitable to focus on niche audience, but eventually it might become profitable enough.
The World Cup is broadcast in many different languages with the same video feed. That’s likely one of the main reasons audio fingerprinting is better than video. You also get better idea of the target demographics language preferences and that leads to more relevant advertisements.
If you have one of those TVs, disassemble it and unplug or remove the microphone, camera and the wireless adapter. Use it as a (rather nice) 4K monitor for a Linux box with Plasma in Bigscreen mode. Pair that with an airmouse remote and you get the most private and user-centric streaming/gaming platform that you can build. Put a decent GPU in the box, add an Xbox controller and Steam and you also built the world's best console.
Has someone qualified that removing the wireless hardware leaves the device functional?
This would be a nice public service for gamers nexus that happened to buy a lot of these devices. :P
I can say from experience in several devices (but not an LG TV) that removing dedicated bluetooth chipsets so far has left devices functional. ... but some things implement their bluetooth as part of the ESP32 that is the whole kit and kaboodle, so you can't remove it.
As to why someone would remove these components -- in addition to the explicit spying LG is doing, there are companies dragnet collecting BTLE device identifiers <> gps collecting, including collecting them via phone apps. This means that if you have any BTLE devices that are frequently with you or otherwise connected to your identity it may be possible for a threat actor to determine your location(s) from largely unregulated commercial databases.
I don't use BTLE at all, so this 'functionality' is a pure risk to me.
That is one thing AI companies try to do, make it impossible to do any kind of piracy or reverse engineering through their "safety alignments". And it's pretty reliable.
> Audio used for wake-word detection is processed locally on the TV and, if no wake word is detected, audio is not converted to text, stored, or transmitted. Voice-recognition results and related technical logs may be generated as part of processing a voice command. These records are associated with specific voice interactions and do not indicate continuous recording of conversations occurring outside an active voice recognition session.
From their statement. This entire thing is contradictory. You cannot both say "not converted to text, stored, or transmitted", while at the same time saying the results may be generated and stored in the form of logs.
We need to hold companies responsible for this shit.
Highly efficient" is 25mW at 33MHz. According to the Wikipedia page, it can run even when the PC is off but plugged in or connected to battery. an ARM Cortex M0-4 will use even less power in idle. All it needs is a tiny capacitor and bootrom and a secret flash storage to record audio and upload it once internet becomes available
"The Intel Management Engine always runs as long as the motherboard is receiving power, even when the computer is turned off. This issue can be mitigated with the deployment of a hardware device which is able to disconnect all connections to mains power as well as all internal forms of energy storage. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some security researchers have voiced concern that the Management Engine is a backdoor.
Intel's main competitor, AMD, has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of its post-2013 CPUs."
People worried about LG. Use Android, iOS and Windows. Use Facebook and TikTok! Use WhatApp and get shocked TikTok keeps all data, video, images, text and reads it. Same as WhatsApp. Drive a Tesla. Have that Ring on the door and other devices.
Go figure. People are strange.
And yes, that ME and PSP are on every cpu since I can't remember, Thinkpad T60 was probably one of the last ones without spy tech.
It should be noted that Gamers Nexus discovered LG TVs reach out and build a map of every device in the area.
They noted the discovery traffic with Wireshark, and commented on LG boasting about how many connected devices their networks can see.
This remains to be a larger issue than the clear fact LG TVs can easily be used as remote spy devices, even when offline, by wirelessly remote connected agents.
At what point do we need to contend with an out-of-band mesh network? Sure you didn't connect your TV to your LAN, but did anyone within LoRa range, on any device from the manufacturer?
We do that but use a Kubuntu Linux laptop behind the TV and a wireless mouse and keyboard (when we want to pause a movie in Chrome and search for something, like details about an actor in a movie).
I've gotten frustrated enough with my Apple TV that once my gen of hardware is no longer supported I'll replace it with a Raspberry Pi. I don't need fancy apps, just a browser for Jellyfin and (sometimes) YouTube. Any other incidental streaming service usage can also be done through a browser anyway.
A heads up: my CachyOS gaming PC has been doubling as my media box. But sadly, I've noticed that modern streaming DRM limits the quality because the OS+hardware is not "trusted". There's probably a way to hack around it, but I haven't gotten into it
Exactly this. Search for a mini PC and it'll have a cheap Intel SoC in it that performs way better than a Raspberry Pi 5 but cheaper (comes with everything for ~$300), and even consumes a similar amount of power.
There it is. Not a single TV at my house ever seen a WiFi password. I add cheap Amazon FireStick and be done. Sure Amazon also spies on me but as far as I know original FireStick does not have built-in microphone and probably is not scanning/copying my LAN content to some cloud/back home. And at any time I can just throw it in the trash, get another $29 device. Once I/you plug WiFi password to your TV, there is now way of coming back.
Rooted all the TVs in the house and now I own the glass and the firmware and the DRM jail. Thanks LG for making everyone burn tokens on plugging your stupid software. But hey now we really own the device and what it does and how it does it.
The leaked advertising pitch videos from them where they say "we own the glass" as a pitch to potential advertising partners, about a tv they sold me just viscerally pissed me off so I'm kind of just done with them even if thats an irrationally strong response. The whole attitude just makes me so mad.
The US agreement says it too. They make you agree to them collecting it. It says they listen to everything that's said in the vicinity and you agree to inform any guests to your house that they're being recorded at all times. But nobody reads that.
And if anyone didn’t watch GN’s video on it, it’s thousands of pages of text requiring a button press to scroll each. It’s designed for no one to read.
We should have laws that limit this kinda of “agreements”
They should flat out be banned for consumer electronics and goods.
It's insane that something you purchase can force a post purchase EULA before it can do anything.
Imagine buying a shirt but there's a 10 page EULA that says you agree to arbitration as soon as you break the seal. Or a blender, or an oven, or a refrigerator.
A lot of the "smart" electronics are in fact just that, they are sneaking in EULAs to use an app to connect to the device which robs you of your rights and protections as a consumer "Oh, the law says we have to give a 10 year warranty, but unfortunately you installed our app to work with your device which says you agree to forgo the warranty and pay us for the right to sue".
The GDPR does. Consent to data processing must be unambiguous, accessible, informed in plain language with no legal or technical jargon, and not have any preselected boxes.
The problem is the capacity to litigate is far surpassed by the world's speed and volume of doing bad.
This is a case where companies' actions should be treated like parking tickets: a fine is issued summarily, with option to appeal, not a slow process of litigation having to happen before a fine is issued.
Also debunked in the Gamer Nexus video. The TV will scan for public wifis and connect. Watching the video, it also seemed like a "missed opportunity" for LG to not create a mesh network of LG devices that would help eachother connect to the internet. So the LG device on your neighbours wifi might help your not connected TV to some tasty internet access. Or at least to unload its cache of A(V)CR fingerprints.
There are so many misunderstandings about that video. Which ain’t surprising as it was longer than a movie and mainly nonsense about what it can do rather than what it does do.
Agreed. I’ve come to believe that the video’s benefit from bringing awareness to the issue is outweighed by how misleading it is. Massive amounts of the video were “we hacked the TV and made it do [bad thing]” and was reported as “LG TVs do [bad thing]!”
Did we watch a different video? The point of hacking the TV, and making it do bad thing. Was to explain the privacy issues inherent with the hardware capabilites for video and audio recording, which combined with multiple known exploits to gain access.
It's a long video, and they cover more than one issue. Please explain what, in particular, you found was misleading.
So a Linux computer with a microphone and network access can send that mocrohpine to the Internet or record it. That’s obvious. That it can scan for WiFi networks is implied by the fact it had WiFi chip, and even exposes that functionality via the front end is also obvious. That it participates in MdNS is known for the fact it’s an mdns target.
What would be worthwhile is what is actually sent. The breathless reporting on it suggests it scans your network, I’ve never seen anything in my router logs to show any kind of port scan or even arp scan.
The only thing that’s seem to be a problem is the ages old adtech which the tech industry tends to be quite happy with as it pts so much of the bills for so many companies
Disclaimer: I haven’t yet watched the video, but on the point of security: yes, when data is collected without my clear approval and full understanding, and is not done in a secure way, it matters all the more.
It’s of little concern to me that the threat is theoretical when it’s only a matter of time before a script kiddy or some bored guy with a YouTube tutorial and $20 of AI credits sets it up himself, let alone well-funded groups or motivated actors.
Unmanaged IOT devices in general are not to be trusted. LG isn’t leading with transparency nor are they big enough like Microsoft or Apple to put out bug bounties and audits with hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on them. They make the device that sits in the corner of your living room and is forgotten about. They’re being cagey about the data they collect and how they collect it, and I’m asked to take the risk on “trust me bro” and “you’re required to tell anyone within earshot of the TV’s mic that they’re being recorded”? Fuck that.
Never mind that data being exposed even if encrypted is a risk all its own: the collection can start now, and whenever it’s detected and blocked it’s too late. It can be cracked later whenever they have the tech and the time.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the television would search for unsecured wi-fi or other ways of connecting to the internet without user input.
I agree, it would be easy for a security research to discover if a TV tried to do that and would result in an even greater stuffstorm than LG is dealing with now or that Samsung dealt with in the past.
It’s absolutely unreasonable. Each subscriber has a certain amount of fixed bandwidth available to them, and there are other devices connected to their network. By connecting an unauthorized device, that device now has both the ability to consume bandwidth to which it’s not entitled, and potentially scan the network for vulnerabilities.
It’s basically stealing.
Would you want some device connecting to your network that is not under your control?
And before you answer “well, you should lock it down,” yes, that’s true, but we do not blame the victim if they fail to do so. An unlocked door is not an invitation.
I'm not sure if any TVs currently do this, but they could connect to unsecured public WiFi without the user doing anything, if one were available with no password. Fortunately such networks aren't that common most places, but it's not a big leap from the sketchy things LG and other companies do. They could also put SIMs in them if they wanted. Again, I don't know that any do that, but I wouldn't put it past them. I'm not that paranoid, but I don't trust them to be up front and ethical.
A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist. Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
I'm not sure of the current state of it, but a few years back specturm was selling access to a private network based on consumer routers. Tmobile could partner with them so that one of their customers could go through spectrum instead of the cell towers in cases where connections were spotty.
That's exactly the sort of thing I could see LG piggy backing on. Your neighbor might have spectrum so the LG TV connects to it's private network to phone home.
Xfinity/Comcast does the same thing. By default, the router they provide has a separate WiFi network supporting their distributed WiFi service. It's only for their customers, and it's not an open no-password network, but I'm certain they would offer it to any company that paid for access. They also have WiFi APs on telephone poles to broaden coverage.
If you live in a dense city, there's a good chance you can reach an open network. When I lived in midtown Manhattan, there were around 500 SSIDs reachable from my apartment.
> A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist.
We use a Kubuntu Linux laptop behind the TV with a wireless mouse and keyboard (for searching and stuff), stream in Chrome, works great. And yes, we trust this combination.
> Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
We don't use Amazon device products just because we use Kubuntu Linux on PC's in our home but yes based on LG's behavior we trust Amazon more and we don't put our LG TV or any of our LG appliances we bought a few years ago, on the Internet.
I have a 10-year-old LG TV that runs webOS 3. The first update slowed it down - not that it was particularly fast to begin with - and every subsequent update made it even slower.
It also constantly nags you to update the firmware. You can’t just refuse once; every time you turn on the TV, it asks you again.
I won’t make the same mistake the next time I go shopping for a TV.
Forgot to mention - there were no improvements whatsoever in terms of functionality.
Agreed. I leave my tv disconnected from the internet, and connect my Apple TV instead… the default UX on most tvs is so much slower and add-riddled than Apple’s
What about the part where it's the consumers obligation to notify guests or people passing by that LG is recording and saving their voices for fuck knows what all. They didn't mention that at all.
They also specify "for advertising purposes" in the response. It's pretty selective in that wording because it implies that it may be used for other purposes.
I for one completely believe them. That's why I rooted my C5, disabled all telemetry, and disabled Internet access entirely by default from an isolated vlan on my network that has no access to anything on any other network. I'm tempted to remove the WiFi/BT board if it's an add-on card, and probably unplug the microphones as well. I only need it as a display for my PC and 4K disc player.
None of the complaining here has the slightest chance of changing anything.
The only way these companies get put in their place is if their products are used to exfiltrate the video or audio of a powerful politician doing something compromising.
Here in Australia cops liked to hide behind bushes at the bottom of a hill with a speed camera / radar as a revenue collection exercise. They kept fining politicians speeding between Sydney and Canberra, and used photos as evidence showing said politicians with women other than their wives in the passenger seats. So the rules were changed so every speed camera needs at least three warning signs before you reach it.
Yeah, it’s naked self interest but it’s the only way things get done in the world.
Someone, perhaps a white hat hacker, needs to start hacking into LG TVs and publishing senators’ wives screaming the name of “the help” in ecstasy while the man of the house is in DC. Or post audio of senators accepting bribes. Whatever, use your imagination!
Suddenly, almost miraculously, privacy will matter, LG executives will be dragged over hot coals, some might even go to federal prison over wire tapping or espionage charges. Same as Huawei.
But my mark words, until a Senator feels burning hot shame over something exfiltrated from their TV, exactly zero changes will happen to consumer protection laws.
So what? We allow people and corporations to lie under almost all circumstances, including most ads and press releases. Get them under oath, if they still deny spying, that would be a minor news item.
So very strange every time I visit Tomshardware.com, I get a pop-up on my iPhone that asked me "Do you want to download "sync-pixel" on
"usync.ingage.tech"?
What is that? And why does it only happen on that website?
Leaving TVs disconnected from the internet is the only way to ignore this.
Connect your own devices and smarts to it.
A broader issue is that it does any kind of recording, or processing of the signals around the tv (from a microphone) or what is displayed on the tv (image) is both extremely private.
Privacy has been violated by LG according to their own wording. a way that is not controlled by settings.
What might LG want with an anonymized hash of the audio being played or shown on someone's screen?
Existing ad matching technology can link it with the video of what you're watching to build a shadow profile of you and then sell the attention of your eyeballs to advertising.
From there, simply what you watch, at what time, for how long roughly sets up a wonderful demographic of age, gender, interests, and all that fun stuff. This is an area of tv and video advertisign that has existed for a long time including online and cable tv boxes.
LG's statement that it doesn't move your info anywhere about what is being watched via audio seems to be a variant of this. Using the audio fingerprint, their software could request an ad for it from another system and direction.
So your information may not leave the TV indirectly, but thsi type of a mechanism does exist in cable tv boxes, etc.
With TVs absorbing the OTT (set top box) functions they are absorbing this too so their claims of how big their market is probably tied to being able to sell advertising into that ecosystem.
It’s likely an unadvertised function only for the benefit and leverage of LG and may be buried in signing your life away to use their “smart” tv functions as well.
A tiny crack in LG tvs can be an attack vector for security and safety. Whether it's audio, or video, or anything.
The best TV is a dumb tv, with all internet disabled and plug in your own smarts that you can hopefully manage better.
A brand is a promise of an experience. This brand has broken a promise and it can’t be pretending it didn’t.
LG can't deny the clips of their sociopathic executives saying things like "we own there glass" and "within an LG TV household we can help extend the ad campaign footprint to the other devices in the household"
It doesn't matter whether they deny specific methods when their execs are quoted giving specific outcomes that require literal spying.
Fuck off LG, and the rest of you doing the same shit.
What astounds me most of all from all this research is how much ownership LG (and through similar legal means, most manufacturers out there) asserts over the device you might have just paid thousands of dollars for - including the physical goods inside. This isn't merely an issue of corporate overreach and mass surveillance, it's a complete and utter failure of policy to adapt to shifting markets or preserve consumer agency.
Maybe an answer is a stripped-down Linux distro for smart TV chipsets that let users clearly disable said features entirely? Since I doubt anyone is going to willingly "go back" to dumb displays when so much data and ad revenue is on the line.
yeah but what about third party analytics packages that may be abusing enterprising or privileged credentials
I think this is all disingenuous and will stay that way until the public asks the right questions to the right people
the CEO of the obvious organization can go in front of Congress and truthfully say “Senator, we are not listening, targeting is based on browsing patterns and data brokers”
while the targeted ads and timelines remain based on all those other inputs, and also audio
Bold from the verge, as clicking the link to go to the official statement took me through 3 redirect trackers as picked up by my browser/extensions (I think ubo to be specific)
Everyone complains but realistically TVs are so incredibly cheap now, I can't believe anyone would make money from hardware alone. I mean a Samsung 55in 4k tv for $300 delivered for free is crazy, let alone the $179 insignia one.
LG's statement:
> ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV.
So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification.
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.06203v1
We're going to have to get saavy in pulling apart the distinction between "I look at everything and then send a nice summary back to my manufacturer" and "I send everything back to my manufacturer". As AI gets cheaper and more efficient, it'll be baked into everything, and will distill signal at the edge and send the good bits back to central command. I fear the legalese in the ToS will obscure this new way of "not collecting" user information.
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
It's probably easier to do and every bit as accurate as just using a screenshot.
And it's still exactly what I don't want them doing. There's literally zero reason for LG to be building an advertising profile on me because I was foolish enough to buy one of their TVs. This isn't something that makes their products better, it's spying.
Here's how it's been done in the past
https://www.cameronmacleod.com/blog/how-does-shazam-work
Audio is a bit easier to turn into a fingerprint for identification vs video. Video has a lot of smaller subtle changes that happen from things like compression which make it a lot harder to identify. It's why youtube still hasn't figured out piracy, but they'll knock you immediately if you play 5 seconds of copyrighted music.
To me, it's not even about why they're doing it (building an advertising profile). I don't want them doing it at all, for any reason.
When I buy something from the store, my relationship is between me and the store, for the 30 seconds it takes for me to pay for it. I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer. I don't want to be tethered in any way to the manufacturer. I don't want to have an account with the manufacturer. I don't want the device sending anything to the manufacturer, advertising related, telemetry, or even a single bit "user has used your product." Do you get it, manufacturers?? I don't want any kind of relationship with you! I want to purchase my product and use it by myself not with you.
> I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer.
I think it depends on the device. If I buy an iPhone, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that necessarily involves a relationship with the app store provider (ie. Apple), not the store I bought the phone from.
With a TV, I suppose it depends on whether I want to install media apps like Prime Video or Netflix on it. I understand that there will be people who don't want that, in which case I agree with you. But others want to be able to run this stuff somehow, whether it's directly on the TV or via some HDMI device like a Chromecast or a Fire Stick. At that point, they _do_ want a relationship with some hardware manufacturer so that the third party app can be delivered to run on the hardware.
> If I buy an iPhone, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that necessarily involves a relationship with the app store provider (ie. Apple)
This is only true because Apple dictates it to be so. The manufacturer of the device should not have a say in what I choose to do with a device I bought. I should be able to install software on a device without asking the manufacturer for permission. Why do they think they should have an opinion? After I purchase the device, it's mine, not theirs. I can throw it off a cliff if I want without asking for Apple's permission, why can't I install software on it?
> At that point, they _do_ want a relationship with some hardware manufacturer so that the third party app can be delivered to run on the hardware.
The device manufacturer should not need to be involved with a user's decision to install software. There should not be this requirement to have a relationship with them. We should never have allowed this idea to be normalized that the device manufacturer needs to be somehow have a say, let alone be the sole path to using the device.
Device manufacturers should sell devices and then get out of the way of what the user is doing with those devices.
I mostly agree, although if the manufacturer has a catalog of software (which they have managed to check for quality, classification, etc) that you can optionally use for installing software (which others can also choose to do, e.g. in the case of Android there is also F-Droid), but that you can also install anything that you want to do by yourself (including software that you wrote by yourself) without needing to be able (or willing) to contact (or have anything further to do with) the manufacturer (for any reason), then it can be helpful.
Also, if someone provides a service (e.g. Netflix) that some might want to use and some might not, then you have the option to use that service might be helpful but even that should not require any relationship with the manufacturer unless they are also providing the service. If the manufacturer is separate then they should not have anything to do with it (e.g. they should not add a button on the remote control specific for Netflix; if they have user programmable buttons that you can add your own labels, then it would be possible to use such a thing like that if the end user decides to install Netflix). (There are other problems with Netflix too but I am ignoring them for now because that would be a separate discussion.)
When I buy a computer, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that doesn't necessitate any relationship at all with any app store provider of any sort (ie. Apple).
(When I buy a pocket supercomputer, I have that same exact expectation. It's often left unsatisfied, but I still have it.)
"If I buy an iPhone" Just dont do idiotic shit like that then.
Then what about all the cloud enabled spyware? How would that work? (/sarcasm)
Truly though, smart-home stuff runs the whole gamut of privacy and device manufacturer relationships. eg: I have used three different smart/room AC units:
- one requires its own cloud-enabled app for any remote connectivity, no HomeKit integration - one integrates with HomeKit but then leaves an upgrade hint that can only be done through an app with a login - one integrates with HomeKit and pretty much just works
HomeKit then allows me to remotely control via HomePod/AppleTV acting as a router ... of course this is just a different cloud connectivity but with on-premises devices controlling other on-premises devices.
For each manufacturer of smart devices, there is potentially a separate cloud where data is being funneled through. Some devices support multiple upstreams.
I get that Matter should be a way to fix it but the reality feels more like https://xkcd.com/927/
Part of me just wants dumb devices back. Get rid of buttons on a microwave (just give me a knob for time and maybe another knob for power setting.) Remove touchscreens from cars (mine glares at me with certain sun-angles.) Bring back the desktop/computer hutch and phones that don't live in your pocket. However, having the ability to start cooling my bedroom 45 minutes before I arrive home is ... pretty compelling too.
Manufacturers just need to realize that LANs exist and allow their devices to be used with the Internet turned off.
When I'm sitting in my home and I want to turn off the AC unit in the other room or close my garage door, there's no reason I should have to do an IP roundtrip to the manufacturer's server. Both devices are on my LAN. They should just talk to each other. This has been a solved problem for decades.
I have a Vizio TV that was advertised as a Chromecast TV, and I got it because of that. It was HDMI and Chromecast only. A few years later they did a silent update that added apps and generally made the UI much slower. I mainly use it with an AppleTV or game consoles, but it still irks me that they completely changed what was in my mind a nearly perfect TV.
Can you factory reset it to the prior state and turn off updates?
(I know this doesn't change what Vizio did, but it might get your perfect device back)
Why was it connected to the network?
They realize. They hate it and wish it would go away. LAN connectivity makes it really hard to spy on you, inject ads, require subscriptions, and brick perfectly functional devices so you have to buy new ones.
I have been toying with the idea of building some kind of "home cloud" that hooks into all of your smart devices (at least all of the open devices that it can), allows photo backups from mobile devices, idk. Stuff like that.
Something you can just scan a QR code with your phone and it hooks it into your backups so your "cloud backup" is sitting in your utility room at home instead of being "someone elses computer"
Obviously this is all achievable by a savvy techie, but I'm thinking along the lines of a black box any idiot can use.
The idea is very appealing to me, I would love to decentralize "the cloud" for your average person.
And if it were possible to get one of these in every house and apartment, then the idea of a "smart home" starts to really click in ways it doesn't right now. Your smart home would have a "home cloud" box that acts as the brain
Idk. I think there's a product idea here somewhere but ultimately it's just something I'm kicking around now and then.
Lowest common denominator? They have to round trip due to various NAT/router/firewall/App BS.
Your average ‘idiot’ can barely get a managed App to work, and that typically requires some kind of cloud endpoint to co-ordinate.
Other stuff is the land of prosumer.
You only need an external server if you want to make it so the end user can access their device remotely. Otherwise, an app can very easily just scan the network for the device. Heck, the app itself could be the thing that sets up the device on the network in the first place.
Remote access should also be do-able without having a manufacturer-run server. We over-complicate things with NAT and with ISPs sabotaging inbound connections to our networks. At least with IPv6 every device on my network is addressable by the outside world, and I can (and should be allowed to) make the decision about whether they are accessible. The device manufacturer should not have to insert themselves into this conversation.
users sometimes end up with some combination of the above:
1) multiple wifi networks 2) ‘guest mode’ wifi networks (you can’t communicate to other devices on the same network) 3) various airplane mode type scenarios where they have cellular but not wifi connections semi-randomly, even on the same property/area.
these all happen with out of the box ISP setups pretty regularly, btw.
and they’ll just blame you for the flakiness.
also, for most of them, they love remote access anyway and don’t want to consider the security implications.
> There's literally zero reason for LG to be building an advertising profile on me because I was foolish enough to buy one of their TVs.
I feel like the world is bossed by people who read (well, ok listened to a 5 minute summary on a grindlife podcast at 1.5x speed) about the Trojan Horse and thought they smelled a business opporunity.
By and large, that has been my experience.
It’s a lot less data to process as well.
> It's why youtube still hasn't figured out piracy, but they'll knock you immediately if you play 5 seconds of copyrighted music.
Unless the piracy is silent, surely audio fingerprinting would catch it?
Is it within fair use to surreptitiously record copyrighted music?
No less than Shazam is?
As much as I detest ACR this seems more plausible than screenshots but I wouldn't trust LG regardless.
Audio is much easier to fingerprint and match against content.
wouldn't taking screenshots in fact not always be possible depending on the content you are watching? For example netflix with their hardware level drm? (Although its their TV they possibly have ways around that with some custom hardware)
LG sits at exactly the location where screenshots are possible.
Eventually, a digital signal needs to be converted into pixels on a screen. Once that happens, it's trivial to also pipe those pixels into a screenshot.
It's the reason DRM for digital media is pretty dumb IMO. The most sophisticated DRM still has to be decoded at some point for the end user to enjoy it. It can always be broken with a camcorder (though quality suffers). However, there exists devices which decode the HDMI signal so doing a pure digital signals.
I can assure you while out sailing the high seas I have watched many Netflix titles. So their DRM is literally only there to make the experience shittier for the honest customers.
lg’s display controller has to know what to send to panel
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
Wrong. They claim it doesn't record video. Recording means saving permanently - live processing is not recording. ACR is processing the video output live.
Notice what they don't say at all. ACR is just one type of spying. A completely separate feature records what you say from the microphone. They only claimed ACR doesn't do that, which we knew. They did not claim the TV doesn't do that.
This is a carefully crafted PR statement, to avoid saying any lies while making it sound like the accusation was wrong, but it does not actually say the accusation was wrong. We can infer that the likely reason it doesn't say the accusation was wrong is that the accusation is right. Instead, it says several other things, which sound like they are refuting the accusation but are actually refuting other things that nobody said.
Exactly, otherwise LG legal would be threatening the authors to publish an apology or be sued.
If they aren't suing they are guilty as hell. Even if they were only most guilty they would sue; their legal dept knows they have no legs to stand on.
As usual, the key to explain the discrepancy between LG's claims and the paper 2024 is in the wording. Read carefully: LG claims it "does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV.". IOW they are making the technical distinction between "fingerprinting" and "screenshots or recordings".
And specifically, they are not confirming or denying that video fingerprinting are done.
What I think is likely is, as the paper states, that they fingerprint both audio and video. Upload both to their servers. But they end up using only the audio fingerprint for ACR. In this situation, neither LG's statement, nor the paper's statement, nor the GamerNexus folks's claims are incompatible with each other.
It even makes sense from a technical standpoint: it is far easier to uniquely identify content by audio than by video, as a fingerprint of a few milliseconds of audio is pretty darn ideal, compared to fingerprinting even a single video frame which has hundreds of ways it could be compressed depending on codecs, bitrate, resolution, etc.
I can’t speak to how LG does this now but I ran an agency that built Smart TV apps and built one of the first ACR powered apps on LG about 10 years ago. We were working with a company called “Cognitive Networks” which later was bought by Vizio and is now their Inscape product. At that time one use case wasn’t just tracking but actual interactive “sync to broadcast” apps (you can still do this, no one does, and I don’t know why)
At that time during testing Cognitive could literally see what we were playing on our TV (not full video but the frames used for fingerprinting)
They don’t use Cognitive anymore for obvious reasons and there are several audio based ACR solutions but they always had issues with sections of video without much audio to work off of so we’re always considered inferior. They are fine for usage data however.
Anyway my $0.02
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
It apparently is.
Do you know the Nielsen Ratings? That's exactly how they know what people are watching these days. I've been contacted by them to be one of their subjects. They ship you a device that listens and recognizes based on content. They look for certain "fingerprints" in the audio and match against that - it's not capable of recording our conversations, etc (or so they claimed).
Is that how they do it lately?
I participated once or twice a good number of years ago, and it was kind of a pain: It involved keeping a paper ledger of what was watched, and when. Correspondence was all handled by regular mail.
(As I recall, they included a small amount of cash ~every time they sent more correspondence and this was a primary motivator to keep going with it.)
The Shazam app on my wife’s iPhone can identify TV shows and movies very quickly, sometimes nearly instantly. Not sure how it does that.
It is pretty neat and several resources online explaining it but it chunks the recoding and does a hash of the fft of each frame i think which reduces the data a lot. The server has a pre hashed database https://hackernoon.com/how-shazam-works-in-a-nutshell
I forgot the part about finding the dominant frequency in each chunk
I know a guy who made a Shazam-like phone app that can listen to a few seconds of noisy audio and make a fingerprint that can be used to quickly ID those specific few seconds out of a pre-fingerprinted archive of an enormous amount of audio (zillions of hours of TV). Making the fingerprint requires a tiny amount of very smart code (in C with no dependencies). But, the fingerprint is not useful for understanding audio that's not in the archive.
TV shows are completed and in the can well before air date. It is entirely plausible that the interested party in having the content identifiable by Shazam like services submit whatever needs to be submitted for new content
I have also wondered about the possibility of media emitting some kind of hidden identifier. Can normal speakers emit noise outside of human hearing that could contain a unique id? Would not even need to be a lot of data that could be broadcast.
Yes, it's possible. Some sports broadcasts do this. The ones I'm familiar with use a high pitched tone on the edge of human hearing but still audible to most people.
Streaming services watermark the video as opposed to the audio as I understand it.
But that's for tracing pirated content back to the originating user account. It's not particularly useful (also entirely unnecessary and overly complicated) if your goal is to ID a piece of content as opposed to an account.
That's not necessary. If a service has access to the raw audio of a show, it can fingerprint each second of that audio in a way that can be matched in a tiny amount of computation even for a recording in a noisy environment.
That can't recognize what you say. But, it can ID where you are in a specific show out of zillions of hours of shows.
Notably, the caught the TV also recording and transmitting recorded audio and transcripts from the microphone.
Honestly, it doesn’t even need to be outside the range of human hearing.
A quick search for “audio steganography” should answer your question (and be a fun rabbit hole if you find that sort of topic interesting)
Signals analysis is pretty refined and not THAT compute intense.
This seems like a credulous argument based on no facts you have provided.
If you explained how the box was hooked up, it would be easier to judge whether there was a chance you were correct.
As it is, your description isn’t even clear whether or not the box contains a microphone.
nielsen's ACR method is embedded into millions of devices and vendors. No need for a microphone, it's processing the audio signal being sent out. A microphone would be a wasted conversion..
(your car infotainment also likely has nielsen tech in it most likely, as they bought arbitron and gracenote)
Notably, the TV was caught making audio recordings and transcripts of conversations, and sending them to LG, independently of all this.
Nielsen is global Company that is used for pricing ads on TV stations around the world. Their way of doing it from what I know personally is that they sign up people to put this ACR boxes voluntarily and then based on extrapolation of data - they can tell you pretty close what was the viewership across demographics. Similar to how election polls are done - you just need a good sample.
It's been done for at least good 15 years.
LMGTFY was made for people like you.
You know you can look it up if you are skeptical, right?
Also, they didn't claim that.
It's how things were always done. The content from broadcasters has/had audio watermarks...frequencies which humans can't hear.
As far as I know, watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization. Nielsen researched and developed ACR technology but it never required watermarks.
When Nielsen first started collecting data (1950s), they handed out diaries to a group of around 5 000 selected households. Nielsen would then collect these diaries and extrapolate viewing patterns across the entire population.
After that came phone surveys. Next step (1980s) was the "people meter", a small box attached to the TV that could automatically detect which channel was tuned and which household members were in the room.
In the 1990s the set-top box made all of that redundant as the cable and satellite providers could directly see which channel every single box was tuned to at all times.
I have a friend who got a Nielson device recently and they were told it relies on watermarks. Their website says a combination is used: https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2023/how-to-measure-tv-audi...
> watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization
Both audio (sports) and video (netflix et al) watermarks are alive and well. They are used to trace piracy (ie account ID), not for content ID (at least AFAIK).
Broadcasters: the cutting edge of streaming information is ours! Now let's make it so everyone unknowingly broadcasts as much info back to us as possible!
Poor Farnsworth. He just wanted edutainment, man.
A long time ago (~1998) I did some consulting for VEIL and Neilson was definitely talking to them...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Encoded_Invisible_Light
Regardless of it being how it always was done, such a finger print can easily be injected into LG's advertising ecosystem to infer everything about your demographic and what your interests and income might be and hit you with more specialized ads.
What we watch is not OK to be fed ads, especially if I wasn't using their service to being with and its monitoring the audio from any input to do this.
In this way, smart tvs and smart home devices are effectively hostile devices behind your router at home.
Yes. It’s also horrible that they have microphones in your home listening to your conversations. LG knowing what I’m watching is awful, but it seems even worse for LG to listen in to the conversation I have with my loved ones about it after. I don’t want to be under surveillance in my own home.
The good news is there is no good reason to plug the TV into the internet.
To watch movies from a streaming service?
Use Apple TV for that.
Always, and only use an external device for streaming services, never the software built into the TV.
Apple TV, Android TV or other devices are perfectly capable and better integrate with mobile and other devices in your network.
The tradeoff consumers are sold is trading convenience of in device apps for security.
Smart home devices like TVs, and thermostats should be treated as default hostile and isolated on a guest wireless network instead of your main one.
Both are unacceptably egregious and done for zero benefit of the customer and a disproportionate and asymmetric benefit for the manufacturer.
I've been trying to learn how to secure LG TVs, and saw that some people do seem to jailbreak them withan open version of webOS.
> I've been trying to learn how to secure LG TVs
It’d be wonderful if we had a grapheneos equivalent for tvs. They’re very capable Android devices. Such a pity “we don’t own the glass”.
Does it matter? Whether they are doing it on device or in the cloud, they are still recording what their customers say and collecting data on it without their consent.
To me, this is really an admission.
No, I think they’re saying two separate things:
- ACR uses audio fingerprinting
- ACR does not collect screen recordings
Both can be true if the TV hashes the frames locally and ACR “collects” the hashes.
They're almost certainly being pedantic about what it means to "collect a recording".
Or if they took all this time to respond because they were busy putting all the stuff they are denying in a second program they called "bcr"
Tom's response: "Sounds good, please don't take offense at me adding https://github.com/furkan-bayrak/lg-tv-blocklist to the PiHole. Can never be too safe, right?"
FWIW, LG will connect to a public DNS and use encryption so a basic PiHole list doesn't help unless you combine it with firewall rules. See the caveats section of that Github link.
Get saavy...? More like "will require trust that manufacturers are honest" -- which I won't believe for a miliesecond.
Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that. No one reads the ToS anyway. Just stop buying TVs, now that Sceptre stopped delivering the last models of consumer dumb TVs.
Well, not that Apple is doing it all their fans will claim it's ok
The thing which depresses me the most is all these so-called smart TV's are giant Arm computers that run malicious software. Imagine if we could re-flash your TV with Linux or whatever.
I can imagine that. We'd have a slow SBC with a fast video decoder, a huge screen that is inseparable and also now uncalibrated, some video inputs for other things, maybe a tuner if anyone can figure it out, and some kind of network connectivity.
I could probably come up with a use for that, but it's about as likely as coming up with a plan for one of the Raspberry Pi Zero Ws that are sitting in the drawer.
From reading other responses, it seems there is an assumption the image itself is fingerprinted. The digital content is encoded, there is essentially a barcode on your TV screen with lines running horizontally that you cannot see with the human eye. The encoding is picked up as the signal, it does not need to see or recognize if that is your favorite actress on the screen.
> That...doesn't seem plausible.
In what way? Dramatically lower processing and signature complexity. Audio signature matching is trivial and extremely well known. I see absolutely nothing implausible about this, and it seems a robust, viable solution.
> This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification.
That paper found no such thing. That paper actually demonstrated that they have no clue how the ACR happened, they just demonstrated that playing content yielded content IDs. It is more likely they were witnessing audio ACR happening, exactly as LG described.
How they spy on people isn't the issue.
Spying on people without explicit consent (in a situation where you can say no without penalty) is the issue.
on-device transcript of audio recording is not audio recording ;)
The key problem is content identification, not how it is done. Seems like they are doing "look over there!" thing.
After doing some investigation into my Bang Olufsen after some tech not working right apparently Dev mode on it allows "Most probable raw grab: ThinQ/SSAP on the LAN after pairing — ~960×540 JPEG. Live Plus/ACR: most probably sends a fingerprint, not a retrievable raw frame."
As per HN thread last week
> ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology
so they aren't even denying listening in on everything?
They're not denying anything about programs other than ACR. That's telling. They didn't say "your TV doesn't listen" or "your TV doesn't collect"
"Everything" would include the microphone, both in the remote and the TV. They're claiming to split off the audio, with one path going to the speakers (and there to your ears), and the other path being hashed (and from there to LG).
They still claim to get your media's audio, but deny using the microphones.
If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? It says the TV owner is "solely responsible" for obtaining all necessary consents from third parties whose voices may be recorded by the device, and must warn household members and guests that their voices may be recorded, and if someone does not agree, the TV's microphone and voice functions need to be turned off. [0]
[0] https://www.lg.com/us/terms
> If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV?
1. The introduction says that Smart TVs are not included in this ToS ("not including Smart TVs").
2. Where do the terms say anything about "sensitive" content? The closest thing I see is section 4.d, but that's just about wiretapping/privacy laws in general.
>If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV?
Other people have mentioned there's other voice features like diction/voice control, so it's plausibly for that.
That's probably the program that uploads everything you say then. Nobody thought the ACR was doing that.
Which paragraph?
They deny ACR uses the microphones. Big difference. Nobody thought ACR used the microphones.
They explicitly state that the audio ACR is done through the "TV’s internal audio processor". e.g. rendered audio, not recorded audio. I mean, you could stretch the claim to have it internal include recorded audio, but that seems dubious.
Why are you giving a shady company with shady terms and shady history the benefit of the doubt?
Because when people cry wolf, and then there is no wolf, it actually harms the consumer by lowering everyone's guard. Have people not learned this yet?
Gamers Nexus discovered recently, through their "AMD blacklisting" bit (when some relatively minor mid-lifecycle refresh of a product they didn't get a demo unit, so it turned into some "we are the truthsayers!" bit), that doing the Louis Rossmann routine earns them loads of links and clicks. So they're firmly in the cry wolf territory now, and it makes me more dubious of their claims that the people they are questioning.
This whole space is filled with bullshit now. Saw another video where a big channel talks about why TVs are so cheap now, and they then explain it that it's because they sell your data. In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
I agree with you that accusations need to be backed by proofs and the kneejerk reactions on HN are embarrassing to read and unhelpful. Big bad evil corp, every single time. I mean those reactions are all over social media, but I just expected a little bit less knee jerk from HN.
> In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
Unfortunately that part if your comment is provably false in at least one instance: Vizio. It's a shame, I thought we were on the same page about spreading half truths.
Vizio's numbers are famously public due to its recent sale. We know they lost money on most televisions sold (not all!), and they made it up in ad revenue and content distribution from those TVs. It doesn't prove that LG loses money on its TVs, but it's clearly not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
> Vizio's numbers are famously public due to its recent sale.
Vizio's numbers were public because they went public in 2021 and like every public corporation they have to report numbers. The sale to Walmart actually made their numbers private again because while they're a part of public company still, it's now thoroughly washed in such a mass of numbers it disappears in any quantifiable way.
> It doesn't prove that LG loses money on its TVs, but it's clearly not as clear cut as you make it out to be
How clear cut do you think I made it? You seem to be claiming my comment said something it didn't.
TVs are being subsidized by secondary businesses for some vendors, to some degree, but that isn't why TVs are cheap. If you completely removed that factor, some makers would be slightly more expensive...but not by that much at all.
Like people do a lot of clever positioning to grossly overstate how much they make from this. And it's worth noting that much if not most of the revenue people ascribe to "ads" or privacy invasion on Vizio, actually came from their Connected+ platform. Vizio had a platform, just like Apple does, and just like Apple they took a cut of every subscription signed up for, or piece of media purchased.
I remember back in the day when laptops had a bunch of pre-installed junk and stupid stickers all over them -- at least in the Windows world -- and people would claim this "subsidized" the laptop. That it made it much less expensive. Some people ran the numbers and it was utterly marginal, but they did it because the average person simply didn't care. If they just increased the price the tiny amount and removed that shit the product would be better, but if most people don't care and you can eek out a tiny bit more, they do it.
Still doesn’t mean they’re not selling the data?
Has that paper been replicated?
this is clearly an "anonymization" claim.
What is anonymous: we record all the hashs from all the programs people are watching to identify people watching the same thing.
What is not anonymous: we hash all the content in the world, along with hashing the content people are watching, and reconstruct what they watched.
> We're going to have to get saavy in pulling apart the distinction between
We probably shouldn't: doing any of this horseshit is a good reason to return a product. We should start doing that en mass until they get the idea.
Note that their statement could also be true if they record 99% of the time. We need to start calling companies out for meaningless weasel statements like "We don't record continuously".
The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record. Putting a remote control listening hardware on a device that runs a plethora of 3rd party apps and with full connection to the internet means that even if LG isn't controlling that mic, someone else will be.
In any case, "We don't record continuously" is still recording. They should not be recording at all!
Enough with the knee jerk reactions. They have to record in some cases. You don't have to like those features, but plenty of people want those features.
- The television has voice control.
- The television has a manually triggered speech-to-text feature so you don't have to type with tv remote.
You simply do not say something like “we don’t record continuously” if the reality is that you only record when voice control or speech to text is active. Given the entire industry’s track record, the only sane thing to do when confronted with weasel wording is to assume the truth is the worst possible interpretation that isn’t a blatant lie, and even then, sometimes it is just a blatant lie.
Here’s some examples:
- We don’t record continuously -> We record nearly all the time, only stopping to upload the recording.
- We do not sell your data -> But we do “share” it.
- All your data is protected from unauthorized LLM scraping -> But we define all the big tech companies as authorized scraping.
You'd think if that was all they recorded for, they would be saying it very loudly to end the speculation that weasel-wording leads to.
None of that requires recording and has been done with embedded hw with local software for years.
> Enough with the knee jerk reactions.
No. Stop minimizing their abuse.
Yes. Another example:
> If no wake word is detected, the audio is processed locally, promptly deleted, and is not transmitted to LG servers.
This statement could still be true when:
* The audio transmission is to non-LG servers (e.g., Alphonso).
* The audio isn't transmitted, but the text transcription is.
or a hash like other audio recognition techniques.
As someone who hasn’t owned a television in decades, why would a TV even need a microphone in the first place?
How many other household devices have a microphone whose primary function is orthogonal to recording audio?
There are lots of good reasons that are used to paper over the abuse cases.
Microphones in tvs are a useful accessibility feature when they enable voice commands for the user, and allow them to be used as voice assistants.
They also enable tvs with a camera and microphone to be used as video calling or audio calling interfaces. Used well we get star Trek view screens, used poorly we get little brother monitoring.
For those interested, it turns the tv into an interactive terminal for voice and camera powered video games, which are becoming more popular.
Unfortunately advertising and tracking incentives drive the abuse cases to the top and will crush the positive use cases :(
Like I do with laptops, just snip wires (or pull out header/connector) to microphone and camera. Problem partly solved.
Fully solve it by disconnecting network cable/Wi-Fi so there's no internet.
For me a TV set only receives FTA signals and has connectors for local media/AV input. It ceases to be a TV set when it starts doing what my PCs and laptops do.
(Anonymity is the reason why FTA broadcasting is still so very important, by design it's only one-way — broadcaster to listener/viewer. Unfortunately smart TVs and the internet subvert anonymity by design.)
There's no practical reason for most people. Spying is the primary function. Edge cases like accessibility or conferencing can be easily enabled with an add on USB mic. You'd need a USB webcam with mic for conferencing anyway.
People use voice commands on TV remotes all the time if they're using streaming apps. At this point it's the default way to interact with the UI for many people.
Typing out the show you're searching for with an awkward onscreen keyboard is a huge pain compared to just clicking a button and speaking.
HN users are very much in a bubble if it's surprising to learn consumers expect voice control functionality on a new TV.
"HN users are very much in a bubble if it's surprising if it's learn consumers expect voice control functionality on a new TV."
Perhaps a few are unaware but most know. As I said in my post, some (like me) only want traditional FTA — and with it comes anonymity by default.
Smart TVs undermine and subvert the virtues of FDA services. It should be mandated that it's possible for modern smart TVs to switch to FTA-only mode if viewers so desire. Similarly, regulation should ensure that dumb TVs always be available for those who want them.
Accessibility is not an edge case. Every single human being who lives long enough will experience some form of accessibity challenge, either for themselves or for others around them.
You can dismiss the lives experience of most humans over the history of humanity, but it won't win you any arguments.
Are there any useful resources for finding devices that don't have surveillance apparatus built in?
I'm still not purchasing a television. The last thing I need is more screen time in my life.
You'd be looking for what's now called a "dumb tv". But those are getting rare, because TVs that can't sell your watch data have to be more expensive to make up for that, and that doesn't sell. Commercial screens are an option, as are computer monitors. Or getting a smart tv and never connecting it to the internet. So far nobody has started shipping TVs with a mobile connection to exfiltrate data, as far as we know. Unlike cars.
> So far nobody has started shipping TVs with a mobile connection to exfiltrate data, as far as we know
Yeah, I suspect that it either isn't a big enough segment of the market to make the costs worth it, or they just haven't been caught. Given that it's pretty easy to add amazon sidewalk connectivity to devices with bluetooth radios (which most of these TVs have to support external wireless speakers), I'd be shocked if they hadn't at least experimented and estimated payoff on doing that.
There are plans to build these networks at various stages. Putatively to enable connectivity, but in practice the tech creates a device to device mesh network that enables side channel communication over a secure mechanism that is not necessarily subject to use control.
I think it would be less time consuming to build one yourself.
Less time consuming than just ... not connecting a new TV to WiFi?
It's pretty straightforward to get dumb behavior out of a modern smart TV as long as you're satisfied with the factory installed firmware version.
"…as long as you're satisfied with the factory installed firmware version."
Why wouldn't one be? Not that long ago 'dumb' TVs never even had firmware (and that was the situation throughout most of television history). Allowing a manufacturer to update TV firmware online is dangerous and foolhardy. (Same reasons why I never let any of my printers go anywhere near the internet—any driver software is always blocked by a firewall.)
> Microphones in tvs are a useful accessibility feature
Made nearly moot by the presence of microphones in most (all?) modern remotes.
I say nearly moot because its worth noting the ability to operate a physical remote may itself be prohibitive to some.
So in effect, there are a multitude microphones in a modern LG environment.
a tv may be the only shared device in low income homes.
Voice recognition is really useful when searching. It's annoying to type with a TV remote. Also you can just say what you want like "play breaking bad on Netflix" and it'll just do it.
Edit: also the mic in the remote has a function to calibrate the speakers to the room (correcting for the impulse response of the room basically) which can make the audio much better.
Since you're using it for Netflix, etc I assume it has unrestricted Internet access. With that and microphone access, you're giving tacit permission to capture and upload basically whatever it wants, to whoever it wants.
That seems unwise, no matter how helpful the features are.
Every speaker can be used as a microphone if the circuitry is added to do so.
Many common SOC's MediaTek, Realtek, and Broadcom SOC's quite often used modern audio capable devices analog pins can be software defined either input or output.
IIRC I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room. Audio quality wasn't perfect, but it making sense what was spoken was good enough.
"…I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room."
Users need to know the electrical features of their H/W and its limits. If a loudspeaker output stage is designed (hardware wired) so that it can never act as an input then no later firmware update can turn the speaker into a microphone.
This is why hardware authentication is becoming more and more important.
limits
Even the screen itself can be used as a microphone, and a pretty good one, too.
1984 purposes.
Orwell's 80 years ahead of his time. The great unwashed who watch Netflix etc. either don't know or don't care that they're mirroring the closing moments of the book.
The warning has been there for 80 years and still most are unaware. When Vespasian built the Colosseum it was to help rule over the unruly. Netflix and ilk are its modern incarnation.
Of course it is needed in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen ...
Some "smart" TVs could do skype in the past, I'm not sure if they needed external headsets of worked with builtin mikes.
> The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record.
Exactly, and recent announcements like Apple normalising always on recording, even wrapped in “big promises” on privacy, deserve a lot more attention and strong regulation.
> Features such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional. These features are not enabled by default. Users can choose to enable these features and can manage or withdraw consent through TV settings.
They may be optional features but I’m pretty sure when I set up my tv and got to the screen where you are required to agree to the various terms and privacy legalese the “happy path” was to hit the “accept all” button vs use the remote to navigate into each one, read, and only activate the few required to use the tv. I would not call this dark pattern “optional” by default.
Even some updates will trigger the acceptance screen from time to time, with a second scare confirmation shown when I reject. If my wife or kids were shown that screen when I’m not around they would accept it.
even if you reject, later on some app from their store won't work until you accept
Recent and related:
LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612329 - Sept 2026 (359 comments)
GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605424 - Sept 2026 (133 comments)
A Screensaver for LG's Spying Smart TVs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605356 - Sept 2026 (13 comments)
LG TVs aren't the only ones spying on you [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49575176 - Sept 2026 (18 comments)
From Nov 2013, but still related:
LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers https://doctorbeet.blogspot.com/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging...
HackerNews discussion (178 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759426
Why would anyone connect their TV to the Internet? It’s been known for years that it spies, although maybe not to this extent. Or are these TVs auto connecting open WiFi or the neighbor’s Xfinity WiFi?
So they can use Netflix or HBO apps and whanot.
The vast majority of consumers are not going to spend another $100-300 on a media player device like an Apple TV, Roku, or nVidia shield. They will use the built in app functionality.
And even those who don't - a very surprising to me number people use the "free channels" most TVs ship with. It's like the streaming version of broadcast OTA I guess for a certain consumer segment.
It's convenient and people 1. don't think it spies and 2. wouldn't care if it did.
And Steve says LG is full of shit. Thanks Steve. https://youtu.be/ToP9xfLDSME
They say these features are opt-in and they reject dark patterns, but in my experience setting up LG TVs, everything was opt-in and I had to manually hunt through all the menus to turn this stuff off.
Their statements don’t align with the reality I’ve experienced as a customer. My TV is not connected to the network, because the setup process left me with 0 trust that LG wouldn’t be collecting information regardless of my settings, or that I didn’t miss something. There was also the risk that they’d add a new “feature” with an update which would I’d be automatically opted in to.
Until they start selling truly dumb TVs, I’m not going to trust anything and their statements fall flat.
> everything was opt-in
Opt-in used to mean that it was disabled until you explicitly click somewhere to enable it.
I probably should have said "everything was already enabled"... Opt-in/out was on the mind, and neither seemed like the right wording to convey that the choice was already made for me in the wrong direction.... I was opted in automatically.
If the checkbox is already ticked it is called opt-out. You have to toggle the checkbox to not be activated. The other way around is opt-in. The checkbox is empty and if you want to enable it you have to take action.
Opt-in: take action to have the feature.
Opt-out: take action to not have the feature.
I would argue there is a very clear unambiguously correct choice of wording for that case. The setting was opt out. It's a binary concept and which case it's in is determined by the default given no user action. If it is opt in, then it is off by default and you have to make the choice to turn it on. If it is opt out, it is on by default and you have to make the choice to turn it off. If it was enabled automatically it is opt out. There's no need to complicate the meaning of terminology with a straightforward definition. Given you don't take active action, that you accept all defaults and take the path of least resistance, is it enabled or disabled by default? That's all that matters.
It was enabled when you accepted the terms and conditions when you first turned it on, or did a firmware update. LGs statment says this:
> ACR is an optional feature that is turned off by default. To enable ACR, a user must accept LG’s Viewing Information Agreement, which describes how ACR works.
Which I take to mean that when you agree to the terms, it enables the feature.
At 5:58 of the Gamers Nexus (GN) video about LG TV's spying, GN make a statement:
So they drank a lot of margaritas while video-recording the section concerning reading and accepting the Terms of Service for the TV.Take that LG legal dept.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&t=358s
I don't think that would hold up in any court in the world. While sober, and in coordination with legal counsel, they made a plan to accept the terms and conditions. That's like a kid swinging their arms around on a playground while saying "I'm not touching you" levels.
I assume that part was for entertainment, this wouldn't fly in court. But they also show the dark patterns used to make you consent to it, and how certain features seem unaffected by these choices or send one last request when revoking consent.
I personally would not trust legal advice from YouTubers who make money from whatever "content" generates the most views. The more outrageous and controversial the better, making sense or being true a distant secondary priority. Even those who make a name for themselves as trustworthy tend to eventually succomb to the incentives of the algorithm if it's their day job.
It's clear that you don't know anything about guys at GN.
If the user needs to accept the viewing agreement to get through the initial setup, and agreement enables those features, then it's an opt-out feature, not an opt-in feature.
The only alternative would be to not accept the agreement and return the TV to the store, because there would be no way to go through the setup and actually use the TV.
I can't remember if this agreement was forced during the last setup I did, but most of these agreements are forced. There is no way to not check a box and still use the device with the desired featured turned off out of the gate.
Maybe they technically have it opt-out, but from a user perspective, that's not the experience. This is a dark pattern and their framing around this solidifies that I will never buy another LG product.
It also gates some "features" like the "AI" auto-detection of media type to automatically switch the TV between sports, movie, gaming, etc. modes as well. At least from my memory of a recent LG OLED setup.
Based on the section on gamersnexus, they use dark patterns to get you to agree. They show a bunch of user agreements to you all at once and auto select the “accept all” button to get your tv working. They hide the optional agreements for spying amongst all the other ones you need to agree to to make the tv work. Most people probably don’t realise you can turn off the checkbox which gives permission to have your tv spy on you.
Yesterday I saw a comment that say that some info collecting was "opt-in by default" and I imagined it was an evil conspiracy f corporations to dilute the name. I just looked for the comment, but it was just another case of error while writing the comment.
Anyway, last year my phone died and I bought a new one made by Samsung. I had to opt out of collection like 4 or 5 times with confusing buttons, and there is a lot of crapware installed by default, and then the phone offered to install two additional apps. I almost sure I said no, but one of them got installed anyway.
It still does.
Opt-in as in don't connect smart TVs to the internet.
For like a decade, the "opt-in" to ACR was included in the ToS agreement needed to use any smart features. Then at least some brands made the opt-in separate, but made it look like a recommendation engine or "help us improve your experience" agreement.
LG adopted the "Maybe Later" dark pattern for opt-in to ACR, at least in some markets. Though I guess you never know for sure with A/B testing.
> "LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as 'Hi LG' is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature."
> LG went on to say that beyond the aforementioned instances, "the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations."
LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
I think the main questions are:
1. Is it fully supported to use LG TVs disconnected from the internet.
2. Are wake word voice controls and ACR truly opt-in. They claim it is in the statement but (as others have mentioned) I remain skeptical what definition of “opt-in” they are using.
Update: some of this is becoming a semantic discussion on the definitions of “recording” and “collecting”, but to circumvent this I would say:
If a device can detect words in my ambient conversations and depending on what it detects (accurate or not) it can send that audio to the cloud, I would describe that device as “collecting or recording ambient conversations”
LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
I don't know how LG TVs do it, but e.g. many smartphones use a dedicated ASIC/audio processing chip that does not really record anything, but specifically listens for the wake word and discards all other audio to save power/battery life. I think this distinction is relevant, because there is a huge privacy difference between streaming a live audio stream to the cloud to detect a wake word and a specialized audio processor that has a small buffer only for detecting the wake word, where the audio does not leave that processor.
Theoretically, you could call that few-second buffer recording, but I don't think that would be collecting/recording ambient conversations to most people, since it's ephemeral and does not leave your device.
The question, of course, is what happens in LG TVs.
Fair points, but if a device can detect words in my ambient conversations and depending on what it detects (accurate or not) it can send that audio to the cloud, I would describe that device as “collecting or recording ambient conversations”
I think that was only done back when the processing power needed was relatively high, or for power constrained devices. I'd be really surprised if they do that for a smart TV.
>LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
No, it's arguably accurate because "record" implies it's being persisted. Otherwise something as simple as a sound meter (which needs a microphone to operate) is "recording".
The word used by LG was processed, not record
Seems like these weasels are using the James Clapper definition of the words “collecting” and “recording”.
> In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
There's a risk here that we will talk-past one another while using different meanings of the same words, so let me offer a scenario:
AcmeTV has an isolated component which taps microphone input, records to a 5-second ring buffer, and on "Wakey-Wakey" triggers an alert flag. Assume it works perfectly accurately.
Would you accuse AcmeTV of "recording or collecting ambient conversations" on the basis of that component constantly reading microphone data?
Personally I wouldn't, because it's not the same kind of "recording" we consumers are concerned about.
> Assume it works perfectly accurately.
Well this is a silly assumption. Wake word false positives happen all the time. (“No Siri, I wasn’t talking to you…”)
Human wake word recognition isn't infallible, either. How often in your life did you respond because you thought somebody called your name and it wasn't actually the case?
I wrote that in to deter kinda-bad-faith responses, where someone tries to play at being an evil-genie, inserting unreasonable flaws into the gaps, like: "But what if it triggered all the time? On purpose!?"
The point is that ethical implementations do exist, and them working does not rely on anything close to perfection--so nitpicking that word isn't helpful.
Point taken. Let’s focus on the “ethical implementations do exist” part though. Let’s say a best possible implementation has 99% specificity. Then if it detects audio that has nothing to do with “LG” it mistakenly treats it as LG relevant 1% of the time. So if audio in my living room is 100x more likely to not be relevant for LG, then half of the audio data LG is receiving is not relevant. So what would an ethical specificity be? And what is actual state of the art?
Later, AcmeTV has a 1MB lookup table of wake words that can be updated OTA. Whenever a wake word is detected, it triggers an alert flag with the device id, word id, and timestamp, and then broadcasts it out as high-frequency sound through the speakers.
Nearby, another AcmeTV or business partner device picks up the sound and sends it to AcmeHQ.
The former device "never transmits your viewing behavior to Acme". The latter device "never records your viewing behavior".
I endorse the cynicism, but I feel that's moving the goalposts a tad, from "good is impossible" to "good is improbable".
Or, in a heavily-paraphrased nutshell:
Plus, if you keep expanding the scope for definitions of objectionable behavior like "recording", you'll quickly reach a point where it would basically apply to any SoC made in the last decade attached to a microphone/speaker. Thus watering down labels to the point of meaninglessness.
Which actually makes it easier for a future EvilTVCorp to get away with recording your conversations 24/7 in MP3 files sent to their server if cynical consumers assume every TV records you anyway, so what's the difference?
I don't know how LG is doing it, but I suspect that they are taking the same approach for wakewords as Alexa does/did. When I worked for Alexa, it was public knowledge that we used relatively inexpensive and low power chips dedicated to wakeword detection, and those would wake up the main chips if they believed that they heard the wakeword. To my understanding, we did this because doing cloud-based wakeword detection was considered incredibly expensive and wasteful, and there are vendors with pretty decent and inexpensive wake word detection chips.
Then, when the system was more awake, it would attempt to figure out whether the wakeword was real or not (e.g. sometimes certain words and word pairs have a very similar sonic signature to 'Alexa'), and if it felt confident enough then it would begin streaming audio to the back end for significantly improved voice recognition.
Since Amazon took (and as far as I know still takes) voice privacy incredibly seriously, voice recordings and data were treated as essentially radioactive waste, deleted as soon as legally possible, and secured against even internal Alexa developer access.
I personally don't have the same level of confidence in security with LG, who seem to think they don't have as much to lose as far as customer trust goes and might as well exploit the heck out of the systems they have. I suspect that problem, which Amazon has so far pretty successfully avoided for the most part, is self-correcting over time.
> Since Amazon took (and as far as I know still takes) voice privacy incredibly seriously
lol no https://apnews.com/article/amazon-privacy-echo-7fb3c19fa7f66...
> When I worked for Alexa
Look I know it's easy to believe these things when your paycheck depends upon it, god knows I've convinced myself of a convenient fact or two when it was necessary for me to get through the day. But afterwards, without a financial interest, you owe it to yourself to go back and think about it again.
>voice recordings and data were treated as essentially radioactive waste, deleted as soon as legally possible
Is this what is done with the "Audio was not intended for this device" entries in the Review Alexa History section of the Alexa app?
>Hi LG
Fuck that. Dystopian shit with people yelling brand names in their homes.
Edit: I forgot people already be yelling Alexa/Siri/Google. I can't imagine a future when you have to yell to each brand in your home. "Hey Sony, turn on the PS7. LG what's on the fridge? Samsung, start the cycle in the dishwasher".
"We own the glass" that's what really stood out to me. I can still disconnect my TV from wifi. But what scares me is when every device comes with their own esim and cellular radio.
You shouldn't be really scared until all devices follow the pattern of the iPhone (and maybe new flagship Android phones too, I'm not in that camp).
New iPhones are expensive, more than $1000. Yet most people who get them finance it through their cellular carrier, usually 2 year plans, so it's just $30-$50 tacked on to the monthly cellphone bill. So ... no one cares unless it's going to double their bill.
Let's say the RAMopocalypse and other AI-driven chip pressues drives everything up even more; let's say now-cheap TVs are now $2000 or $3000. No biggie. Your cellphone company can offer you an eSIM-locked TV with bundled network and services, on a 5 year plan with free lifetime service and replacement, adding just $30-$40 to your bill for 5 years. Maybe it will include something like Family Tracker Life360 Intercom as a value-add - talk to your children to/from the TV to/from any phone on your plan, anywhere, anytime. Safety, etc.
Same thing with your laptop, home IoT/security devices, etc.
If ATSC 3.0 dies and gives way to 5g Broadcast, it'll be another enabler for something like this.
That's when the real lock-in will happen.
Same here, I registered the domain [0] moments after watching the GN video. It's serving an oled-safe screensaver with some, uh, relevant content.
[0] https://weowntheglass.com
Genius move. Very relevant and thoughtful content.
When you buy a BIC pen, you own all content created with that pen, not BIC. This needs to be applied to all other tools; computers, TVs, AI agents, ...
With out the user the content would have never been created. Users are the content creates and now the push to remove their owners ship of their actions and move it to the wealthy.
Greed begets more greed.
Introducing the new BIC Ai SmartPen. Every word you write gets sent back to the BIC data center. Give one to every kid in school!
They don't need that - look up Amazon Sidewalk.
Sonofa, it’s like those corporations are the KGB or something. It’s getting really hard to keep up on all their shady shit.
Gamers Nexus responded to LGs claims here:
https://youtu.be/ToP9xfLDSME
ACR is "not enabled by default"? Is this actually true or is it one of those weasley technicalities where the tv ships with it turned off, but once you connect the tv to the internet it turns on?
Technically when you turn the TV on for the first time, ACR is not enabled. Ergo, not enabled by default.
Sure, to use the TV you need to go past the EULA screen. And the button right in front of you, pre-selected - is agree to all terms. And after pressing OK, you now have ACR turned on. But you did that, it wasn't on by default.
Okay I can take my soul sucking corporate hat off now.
Soul sucking is right.
Its looks like the sort of stuff that happens to a tragic fantasy hero after a Faustian deal. Except they would've asked for riches, love or eternal youth, we on the other hand just want our middling-quality tv to work.
Sure, to use the TV you need to go past the EULA screen.
And that's where the problem is.
TVs should be TVs. Phones should be phones. Cars should be cars. If the manufacturers can't help themselves adding other stuff that is for their own benefit and not the product owner's and some of it so bad that it needs legal weasel words to CTA and competition in the market is insufficient to kill these practices off then it's time for heavy-handed regulation.
Maybe we say you can't sell any product in these categories in our country with any remote connectivity at all except for specifically permitted uses. Maybe the penalty for wilful violation is a warning with a big fine. Maybe the penalty for repeated wilful violation is fines that are an existential threat to the business and personally barring the corporate executives from holding corporate office for the next five years. That kind of thing.
On LG TVs there are about 5 separate agreements you need to accept. You dont need to accept them all to use the tv, but in the initial setup LG puts a handy 'Accept All' button front and center, which agrees to all 5 incrluding the unnecessary ones and turns on the ACR feature. This is the dark pattern most people are pissed about.
But again the real question is why a TV should need users to accept any kind of post-sale agreement at all to be used normally (meaning "as reasonably expected and/or explicitly advertised").
Maybe the simplest solution is to pass a consumer protection law that completely nullifies any such post-sale agreements and makes pre-sale agreements enforceable only if they have massive prominence and standardised warnings on the packaging like the ones we require here in England on tobacco products. Then everyone can just use the regular tech security and privacy laws against any company that is spying on its customers or compromising their home networks without consent - which would probably be any company that operated this kind of scheme at all because I doubt many manufacturers would want to print "WARNING: USING THIS PRODUCT DAMAGES THE SECURITY AND PRIVACY OF YOUR HOME AND DEVICES" in six inch high lettering on their boxes.
I'm no lawyer, but afaik so-called "shrink-wrap" licence agreements, where vendor would like people to believe you've agreed by buying & using the product, are null & void legally speaking. Primarily because there's no way to say "no" before unboxing the product.
It's okay to ASK for permissions afterwards, if user can decline. But if such permissions are required to use the device normally, then the proper course of action is decline, if product then fails to do its job, take it back to store as broken & demand money back (no, coupons won't do!). Any seller refusing at that point would have a hard time avoiding legal repercussions should you decide to pursue it.
That is: in countries with reasonable consumer protection laws (like EU).
You need to accept them to use most any of the apps though which is super sleazy
Yeah, that's why I only agreed to the minimal terms needed to use the tv, everything else is unchecked
Seems kind of outrageous you had to agree to any terms, even minimal ones. TVs existed for many decades without needing terms.
Yeah you'd think they should allow a "dumb TV mode" where you agree to nothing.
https://youtu.be/6IFVTcM28KA?t=1370
They at least use a pattern where you need to accept terms of use & privacy policy when you download an app. Same screen has option to accept other agreements like ACR. However by default "select all" option is highlighted so people will often click that.
Slightly earlier on video they state that certain ad related things got turned on automatically during software updates.
I bet it's inadvertently enabled if you want to watch Netflix within 5 minutes of powering on the TV and rush through its setup
it turns on when you agree to the 197 page arbitration agreement
source: i made it up
Could just be enabled with a simple update post-unboxing to make it compliant with that statement. Off by default but enabled as soon as it connects.
Why don’t you read LG’s actual statement, which states that it “requires separate explicit user opt-in consent and can be disabled at any time through the TV settings.”
Remember that one time when music CDs from Sony MBG installed a rootkit on your PC that continuously sent whatever MP3s you had on your PC back to them?
Remember when Amazon deleted books from customers' Kindles (eBook reader), and the book they decided to remotely burn was .. 1984 from Orwell.
I was alive for that but had forgotten about it…wild.
Yep and they were fined a paltry 6 million dollars or so. For actively distributing and infecting users with malware. This on annual sales exceeding $3B.
That case sure put Mark Russinovich on everyone’s radars, at least.
Good times.
First time hearing of this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
As the saying goes, this is what radicalized me. If any one of us did anything close to this we would be treated like Aaron Swartz and given a 35+ year prison sentence.
But in the Sony case the DOJ didn't even threaten criminal charges.
"LG Says We're Fake News" - Gamers Nexus https://youtu.be/ToP9xfLDSME
Wow. I hope Gamers Nexus sues for defamation.
Change url to source? https://www.lg.com/global/newsroom/news/statements/statement...
Also they provided a statement earlier to Gizmodo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628328
> "LG also said that its features like “Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional,” and “not enabled by default.”
I am absolutely certain that ACR was enabled on our new TV by default, back some years ago. I am nearly certain their voice recognition, and advertising spying were enabled on our TV by default.
If none of this is truly "enabled by default" then this is a recent development.
I discovered this many years ago and did some deep dives, and unfortunately didn't publish anything about it. Lesson learned.
It is not enabled by default, but conveniently it's toggled on if you accept the ACR terms of service - including if you select "agree to all" - during TV setup and/or when downloading or updating any apps.
A few months ago, my Roku TV started displaying these weird popups, saying something like, "Looks like you're watching college basketball. Did you know Roku-TV also has college basketball?" - something like that. Well, for the Roku device, yes, there was a setting I could disable, but (1) Roku pushed this 'feature' and made it default without my knowledge/consent, and (2) the config setting says the popups will stop, but it doesn't mention the data collection; my assumption is they're still collecting that data for their own data analytics purposes.
Pretty much the exact reason I stopped using Roku. I bought a streaming device to stream, but apparently roku decided selling devices wasn't lucrative enough so they started selling ads instead.
I really wish there was a better way to do a media center linux.
Same experience here. Roku has been doing opt-in ACR for a while now. Pulled the ethernet cable out that same day.
I've one question: I've used android phone (realme, which is chinese). And i remember that whenever we used to discuss somethings among our friends, i started used to get ads realated to that on my laptop, phone within atmost a hour.
So, was realme transcribing all conversations and uploading it? Can someone answer?
Wired wrote an article in 2017 [1] on whether it's possible/probable to do that. Technology has evolved a lot since then, so it's a lot more feasible, but the article describes how far metadata alone can go.
For example, let's say an ad network knows your and your friends' location, and knows you've met because you've been close together frequently, or are using the same wifi network. You talk about perfumes, then later one of them looks up perfumes on their phone. Google would usually have access to this much metadata, and will likely serve you perfume ads because of your friend who later looked it up.
This doesn't directly answer your question though. The answer would be - it's possible, but a lot is possible without that.
[1] https://archive.is/OyuUO
I don't know, but I suspect the battery drain would be substantial. I wonder if there is a different explanation: maybe one of your friends searched for information on the topic while you were on the same hotspot/in the same location and that (along with existing relationship graphs?) allowed them to target you? That's how I'd do it, I think.
There is a real possibility that either something you saw triggered the conversation and/or that you remember the ad because you spoke about it. It’s enough to linger on an ad for the platform to recognize your interest and serve you more ads like it.
It's technically possible but very unlikely. Running TTS continuously is a big battery drain and slows down the rest of the phone while you're using it. Google has a live TTS service for hearing impaired which I've run for a while to test it, and even with it practically built into the OS it's sucking up battery like you'd expect it to.
It's more likely that this is all due to external forces. Having your device on the same network, in close enough proximity to detect each other, for instance, combined with one of your friends having Googled the stuff you were talking about.
Or just basic data collection. There's the classic story about how supermarkets know you're pregnant before you do, just based on the groceries you buy (no, not pregnancy tests). Ad networks buy and collect a humongous amount of information about everyone and serve ultra specific targeted ads based on nothing more than pattern matching based on what the rest of humanity is doing.
It's impossible to rule out that the thing did run a 24/7 TTS service, but I think the depressing fact that ad networks don't need to listen to our conversations to know what we're talking about is more probable.
You don't need monitoring for that to work. Just something like "Hey, Google". The device knows a bunch of keywords and when it hears them it's bingo. As long as your laptop and phone are logged into the same local network with the same public IP they'll get the same ads.
And your phone most likely already listens all the time to catch an "Hey, Google" (or something similar).
No phone has ever been caught doing that. But TVs and phones have been caught collaborating. What brand is your TV?
Good read: https://www.amitracked.com/learn/is-my-phone-listening-to-me
Absolutely not a good read. Informative, but it tortures the language, as is usual for slop.
I think, sadly, I'm becoming immune to slop because I (till now) believed I'm good at reading through LLM junk and that read quite normally to me. How annoying. My apologies.
I agree with the conclusion, but the whole article is obviously AI slop.
I think the disappointing reality is that those ad networks have enough access to the content of your attention (and therefore what you talk to your friends about) that the technical cost and risk of surreptitious audio monitoring just isn't necessary.
People always dismiss this as FUD but it's been happening to me more than ever. I know in many cases it is more likely that firms are acquiring purchase histories and location data but that doesn't explain other incidents.
For example, last week I was complaining to my spouse about shoulder pain and how I was afraid I may need another surgery. YouTube has suddenly starting flooding my feed with videos about "shoulder exercises to avoid surgery." I hadn't searched any of those terms, purchased anything or visited an orthopedic, so I don't know what else could possibly explain it.
The alternative explanation is that your spouse searched up something related to your situation.
That’s the next possibility to eliminate.
I am positive I get ads based on the interests of other people the wifi where I live.
It could have been something as simple as lingering on some kind of content related to physical therapy on a social media feed before scrolling past it, or maybe your wife googled it and it got correlated via network?
If you live in the United States you should find out who your state senator and representative are and write a letter to them asking them to propose, and support legislation prohibiting spying and increasing consumer privacy protection.
Kentucky passed HB 692 unanimously requiring smart TVs to ask permission if they are going to be spying on us. Ask your state legislature to follow their lead and pass some very popular consumer privacy protection.
“LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as 'Hi LG' is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature."
The definition of “process” is really important and is missing. LG could process all transcripts on their servers too and stay within a very wonky definition of “process” on the TV that excludes transcription and transmission.
What was the alternative? "LG admits to spying claims, execs align to be arrested asap"
That's not a denial, that's confirmation that they are spying on you.
LG’s Approach to Privacy
Our approach is guided by four principles:
Transparency – Helping users understand how smart TV features work and how related data may be used.
User Choice – Giving users meaningful control over optional features and services.
Informed Consent – Supporting informed decisions through clear and manageable consent choices.
Continuous Improvement – Continuously improving privacy controls, transparency, and security protections.
--------------------
Transparency:
This document isn't terribly easy to understand by the standards of traditional TV's. You have to pay close attention to figure out what is and isn't going on, and when. It also should have been taped to the front of every LG TV when it comes out of the box.
User Choice:
There is extensive explanation of how what LG TV's are doing isn't nefarious, but the fact remains that there's no switch to turn it off. Why not just put a simple hardware on/off switch on these TV"s to turn off all connectivity? Maybe some users want dumb TV's, or maybe they just don't want to worry about all of this.
Informed Consent:
Buyers apparently consented to this at the store. Now you're finally informing them. That's now how informed consent works.
Continuous Improvement:
I'll believe LG and other Smart TV manufacturers are serious about this when they add a hardware wifi on/off switch, and not a moment before.
I simply don't connect any TV to the internet.
Instead, I connect a Google TV Streamer, as I'm in the Google ecosystem. For my friends in the Apple ecosystem, I tell them to do the same with an Apple TV box.
This is the way. My TV tries its hardest to get me to connect and whenever I turn it on, it doesn’t fail to remind me that I’ve disabled the microphone and that I should turn it back on. But as soon as the Apple TV takes over all is good.
The only reason TV’s are getting cheaper is the business model changed. Now your viewing data (and perhaps conversations) are part of their product offering.
This is just straight up false.
OLED productions costs have fallen, and the yields have gotten better — displays of all kinds have gotten cheaper, not just TVs; OLEDs have started showing up in products they haven’t before for cost reasons, etc.
The manufacturers make some profit on the data they harvest, sure; but the biggest BOM costs of TVs have definitely also dropped sharply.
It's probably mixed. I think Vizio's financial statements suggest they lose money on TVs and make it up on user data, but I'm not sure this holds for other manufacturers. I agree with you that TVs have gotten much cheaper to make, which probably incentivized the "collect it all" mentality, since their reach has increased and they can target more customers with lower prices.
The margin on tvs is slim.
Companies like Vizio make vastly more on the ads and data than they do on the tvs.
Some quarters they even take a loss. They took a $7m bath on hardware while booking about $120m on ads and data.
We’re never getting good tv’s back. It’s only going to get worse. Now they’re starting in on monitors.
The only lifeline would be consumer protection, which obviously won’t happen in the US.
So they shouldn’t bother selling the TVs at all?
When they spend 400 on a tv and sell it for 410 and sell the data for 40 it doesn’t mean the data makes 4 times as much as the tv. The cost of gathering that data is still 400, they have nothing to sell without spending 409 in the hardware.
It seems conditions are such that the TV selling business is worthless (i.e. unprofitable) without collecting the data, and the TV data collection business can't work without selling TVs.
Or just sell the tv for a higher price rather than using it as a loss leader?
> Some quarters they even take a loss.
They have good accountants isn’t it?
Both can be true.
The person I’m replying to said “the only reason”, so no; they can’t.
You're correct. And yes, I shouldn't have said “the only reason”, I'd amend that to "one of the reasons".
I don't need the TV to be cheaper. I can afford to make up the difference for whatever few hundred dollars extra they would earn selling my data. But the expensive ones do this stuff, too.
So what you're saying is you're more valuable to advertisers . . . which means the amount you are worth to them grows with the amount you'd spend to avoid them.
Unless this stuff is made literally illegal they will keep doing it, because it's far more profitable than the alternatives. This is precisely why ideas like paying for a privacy respecting option on Facebook could never work.
I recently solved this problem by buying the Dell U5226KW. It has the same height as a 16:9 42" TV, but is 21:9, so a lot wider. It costs about four times as much as a similar sized 16:9 TV and you can't get it any bigger.
Does anyone make a TV these days that's just a TV?
LG TVs boot Linux and have plenty of capabilities. Why would they not ... take a look around at the environment ... to best enhance ... your errr experience.
LG are amongst equals here. I've seen devices (TVs/cameras) do ping sweeps and then port scans.
I have two VLANs at home: THINGS for IoT and SEWER for things that look really dodgy.
I drive a (Seic) MG4 EV. I use the Home Assistant integration for that and put up with the rest. To be fair I live in the UK and we are quite efficiently ... observed.
A quixotic legal dream: All consumer data-surveillance must take the form of an opt-in monthly payment plan, which either side can cancel.
So the TV gets advertised as "$$$, but basically $$ if you sign up to be surveilled and get a $/month check back." If the company sets $/month too low--or is too creepy about what they collect--people just won't opt-in.
But what happens if they promise big pay-backs but routinely cancel from their side? That's a problem, but at least it's a kind the market [0] can handle when it comes to reputation and bad reviews.
[0] "Markets are good, use them." -- "OK, fine, you must price this on a market." -- "NOT LIKE THAT!"
More like "a capitalism fever dream"
For practical fixes, consider replacing the TV with a “commercial monitor” and connecting an Apple TV device instead (or an open source thingy).
Disconnecting “smart tv” from internet to use Apple TV is possible and might work, but you will get nagged to reconnect all the time. And TV mfr will eventually try to find workarounds - purchase access to wireless connections from large-footprint connectivity providers (Xfinity WIFI, 4g/5g networks, etc) or create a p2p network among their own connected devices. I doubt they do it right now as it’s less profitable to focus on niche audience, but eventually it might become profitable enough.
The World Cup is broadcast in many different languages with the same video feed. That’s likely one of the main reasons audio fingerprinting is better than video. You also get better idea of the target demographics language preferences and that leads to more relevant advertisements.
"Nearby sounds or speech occurring at the same time as a user's command may sometimes appear in speech-recognition results."
"Do not continuously record or transmit"
Soooo....
If you have one of those TVs, disassemble it and unplug or remove the microphone, camera and the wireless adapter. Use it as a (rather nice) 4K monitor for a Linux box with Plasma in Bigscreen mode. Pair that with an airmouse remote and you get the most private and user-centric streaming/gaming platform that you can build. Put a decent GPU in the box, add an Xbox controller and Steam and you also built the world's best console.
Has someone qualified that removing the wireless hardware leaves the device functional?
This would be a nice public service for gamers nexus that happened to buy a lot of these devices. :P
I can say from experience in several devices (but not an LG TV) that removing dedicated bluetooth chipsets so far has left devices functional. ... but some things implement their bluetooth as part of the ESP32 that is the whole kit and kaboodle, so you can't remove it.
As to why someone would remove these components -- in addition to the explicit spying LG is doing, there are companies dragnet collecting BTLE device identifiers <> gps collecting, including collecting them via phone apps. This means that if you have any BTLE devices that are frequently with you or otherwise connected to your identity it may be possible for a threat actor to determine your location(s) from largely unregulated commercial databases.
I don't use BTLE at all, so this 'functionality' is a pure risk to me.
gamer's nexus responds to lg's response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToP9xfLDSME
We need to start using AI to hack our own devices and make our own TV os, sort of like was done for routers. Probably relatively doable these days.
That is one thing AI companies try to do, make it impossible to do any kind of piracy or reverse engineering through their "safety alignments". And it's pretty reliable.
If it’s not true, why put the capability in there in the first place?
They can be trusted as much as Sony and game ownership i suppose.
I still have an 1080p TV because I can't be arsed to do the research on what 4k TV won't spy on me.
It helps that most "content" isn't worth 4k anyway.
That's a bold play given how "caught red handed" the gamersnexus video was.
> Audio used for wake-word detection is processed locally on the TV and, if no wake word is detected, audio is not converted to text, stored, or transmitted. Voice-recognition results and related technical logs may be generated as part of processing a voice command. These records are associated with specific voice interactions and do not indicate continuous recording of conversations occurring outside an active voice recognition session.
From their statement. This entire thing is contradictory. You cannot both say "not converted to text, stored, or transmitted", while at the same time saying the results may be generated and stored in the form of logs.
We need to hold companies responsible for this shit.
Maybe they should have shorter and clearer terms? Maybe it should be easy to just opt out?
Of course they claim that, but they are not to be trusted. The capability is there, therefore it will be abused.
The real issue here is they’ve been dishonest and less than candid with their customers.
Trust broken, words out, and their statement doesn’t really do anything to mending that.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-KgX9xyIRK8 "Can the CIA really spy on your phone?" He mentions TV and while it's off.
by the way, Intel's Quark chip is installed at least 3 times on each chipset and can run on a Minix OS when plugged in to the power and off:
from: https://web.archive.org/web/20201201175708/http://blog.ptsec...
Highly efficient" is 25mW at 33MHz. According to the Wikipedia page, it can run even when the PC is off but plugged in or connected to battery. an ARM Cortex M0-4 will use even less power in idle. All it needs is a tiny capacitor and bootrom and a secret flash storage to record audio and upload it once internet becomes available
"The Intel Management Engine always runs as long as the motherboard is receiving power, even when the computer is turned off. This issue can be mitigated with the deployment of a hardware device which is able to disconnect all connections to mains power as well as all internal forms of energy storage. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some security researchers have voiced concern that the Management Engine is a backdoor.
Intel's main competitor, AMD, has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of its post-2013 CPUs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
There are countless low or passive power audio devices since the Thing that can record and upload/bounce audio to receiveing devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
People worried about LG. Use Android, iOS and Windows. Use Facebook and TikTok! Use WhatApp and get shocked TikTok keeps all data, video, images, text and reads it. Same as WhatsApp. Drive a Tesla. Have that Ring on the door and other devices.
Go figure. People are strange.
And yes, that ME and PSP are on every cpu since I can't remember, Thinkpad T60 was probably one of the last ones without spy tech.
FYI AMD's PSP does not connect to the internet like Intel's ME does.
IIRC Intel renamed it to Intel CSME some time ago; the I in CSME stands for integrity.
There's no I in CSME. I'm just kidding.
much love to AMD.
It should be noted that Gamers Nexus discovered LG TVs reach out and build a map of every device in the area.
They noted the discovery traffic with Wireshark, and commented on LG boasting about how many connected devices their networks can see.
This remains to be a larger issue than the clear fact LG TVs can easily be used as remote spy devices, even when offline, by wirelessly remote connected agents.
How can we lock down a TV, still use it but trust we aren't being spied on?
Don’t give your TV internet access, and use an Apple TV.
At what point do we need to contend with an out-of-band mesh network? Sure you didn't connect your TV to your LAN, but did anyone within LoRa range, on any device from the manufacturer?
Create an open Xfinity Wi-Fi network, as well as an AT&T one. See if the TV connects to them.
This is probably obvious to most people, but I will mention just the same: do not install the antenna that the TV comes with.
> This is probably obvious to most people, but I will mention just the same: do not install the antenna that the TV comes with.
Wifi antennas would typically be internal and unrelated to the one F-Type coaxial connector one would typically think of as the "antenna" input.
Can't really stop the internal module from scanning and connecting to open access points unless you control the software.
We do that but use a Kubuntu Linux laptop behind the TV and a wireless mouse and keyboard (when we want to pause a movie in Chrome and search for something, like details about an actor in a movie).
I've gotten frustrated enough with my Apple TV that once my gen of hardware is no longer supported I'll replace it with a Raspberry Pi. I don't need fancy apps, just a browser for Jellyfin and (sometimes) YouTube. Any other incidental streaming service usage can also be done through a browser anyway.
A heads up: my CachyOS gaming PC has been doubling as my media box. But sadly, I've noticed that modern streaming DRM limits the quality because the OS+hardware is not "trusted". There's probably a way to hack around it, but I haven't gotten into it
I tried doing this and the video stutter on a raspberry pi made it too annoying. Probably better off using an N100
> Probably better off using an N100
Exactly this. Search for a mini PC and it'll have a cheap Intel SoC in it that performs way better than a Raspberry Pi 5 but cheaper (comes with everything for ~$300), and even consumes a similar amount of power.
That's too bad! Which Pi version and RAM configuration did you try?
There it is. Not a single TV at my house ever seen a WiFi password. I add cheap Amazon FireStick and be done. Sure Amazon also spies on me but as far as I know original FireStick does not have built-in microphone and probably is not scanning/copying my LAN content to some cloud/back home. And at any time I can just throw it in the trash, get another $29 device. Once I/you plug WiFi password to your TV, there is now way of coming back.
Leave it offline.
Rooted all the TVs in the house and now I own the glass and the firmware and the DRM jail. Thanks LG for making everyone burn tokens on plugging your stupid software. But hey now we really own the device and what it does and how it does it.
The leaked advertising pitch videos from them where they say "we own the glass" as a pitch to potential advertising partners, about a tv they sold me just viscerally pissed me off so I'm kind of just done with them even if thats an irrationally strong response. The whole attitude just makes me so mad.
GDPR is forcing them to detail which private data they collect.
The US agreement says it too. They make you agree to them collecting it. It says they listen to everything that's said in the vicinity and you agree to inform any guests to your house that they're being recorded at all times. But nobody reads that.
I find deeply stupid to buy a tv that can potentially spy you but I am pretty sure they do it with phones also...
Every day I want to keep tech more fenced and far from me and only use it for what I need.
Is it disclosed on the box the TV comes in?
Nope.
they detail, but no one reads that anyways
And if anyone didn’t watch GN’s video on it, it’s thousands of pages of text requiring a button press to scroll each. It’s designed for no one to read.
We should have laws that limit this kinda of “agreements”
They should flat out be banned for consumer electronics and goods.
It's insane that something you purchase can force a post purchase EULA before it can do anything.
Imagine buying a shirt but there's a 10 page EULA that says you agree to arbitration as soon as you break the seal. Or a blender, or an oven, or a refrigerator.
A lot of the "smart" electronics are in fact just that, they are sneaking in EULAs to use an app to connect to the device which robs you of your rights and protections as a consumer "Oh, the law says we have to give a 10 year warranty, but unfortunately you installed our app to work with your device which says you agree to forgo the warranty and pay us for the right to sue".
The GDPR does. Consent to data processing must be unambiguous, accessible, informed in plain language with no legal or technical jargon, and not have any preselected boxes.
https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/
The problem is the capacity to litigate is far surpassed by the world's speed and volume of doing bad.
This is a case where companies' actions should be treated like parking tickets: a fine is issued summarily, with option to appeal, not a slow process of litigation having to happen before a fine is issued.
yeah, but if you want to know you can. and it isn't that everybody needs to analyze it.
Well. I sure am relieved.
Easy solution. Do not connect your TV to the internet.
Also debunked in the Gamer Nexus video. The TV will scan for public wifis and connect. Watching the video, it also seemed like a "missed opportunity" for LG to not create a mesh network of LG devices that would help eachother connect to the internet. So the LG device on your neighbours wifi might help your not connected TV to some tasty internet access. Or at least to unload its cache of A(V)CR fingerprints.
LG is truly an adversial party in all of this.
They didn't actually say it does that. They said it could do that. It doesn't (yet).
There are so many misunderstandings about that video. Which ain’t surprising as it was longer than a movie and mainly nonsense about what it can do rather than what it does do.
Agreed. I’ve come to believe that the video’s benefit from bringing awareness to the issue is outweighed by how misleading it is. Massive amounts of the video were “we hacked the TV and made it do [bad thing]” and was reported as “LG TVs do [bad thing]!”
Did we watch a different video? The point of hacking the TV, and making it do bad thing. Was to explain the privacy issues inherent with the hardware capabilites for video and audio recording, which combined with multiple known exploits to gain access.
It's a long video, and they cover more than one issue. Please explain what, in particular, you found was misleading.
So a Linux computer with a microphone and network access can send that mocrohpine to the Internet or record it. That’s obvious. That it can scan for WiFi networks is implied by the fact it had WiFi chip, and even exposes that functionality via the front end is also obvious. That it participates in MdNS is known for the fact it’s an mdns target.
What would be worthwhile is what is actually sent. The breathless reporting on it suggests it scans your network, I’ve never seen anything in my router logs to show any kind of port scan or even arp scan.
The only thing that’s seem to be a problem is the ages old adtech which the tech industry tends to be quite happy with as it pts so much of the bills for so many companies
Disclaimer: I haven’t yet watched the video, but on the point of security: yes, when data is collected without my clear approval and full understanding, and is not done in a secure way, it matters all the more.
It’s of little concern to me that the threat is theoretical when it’s only a matter of time before a script kiddy or some bored guy with a YouTube tutorial and $20 of AI credits sets it up himself, let alone well-funded groups or motivated actors.
Unmanaged IOT devices in general are not to be trusted. LG isn’t leading with transparency nor are they big enough like Microsoft or Apple to put out bug bounties and audits with hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on them. They make the device that sits in the corner of your living room and is forgotten about. They’re being cagey about the data they collect and how they collect it, and I’m asked to take the risk on “trust me bro” and “you’re required to tell anyone within earshot of the TV’s mic that they’re being recorded”? Fuck that.
Never mind that data being exposed even if encrypted is a risk all its own: the collection can start now, and whenever it’s detected and blocked it’s too late. It can be cracked later whenever they have the tech and the time.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the television would search for unsecured wi-fi or other ways of connecting to the internet without user input.
I agree, it would be easy for a security research to discover if a TV tried to do that and would result in an even greater stuffstorm than LG is dealing with now or that Samsung dealt with in the past.
More advertising money (the irony) by conflating capabilities of a Turing complete OS with actual behaviour
It’s absolutely unreasonable. Each subscriber has a certain amount of fixed bandwidth available to them, and there are other devices connected to their network. By connecting an unauthorized device, that device now has both the ability to consume bandwidth to which it’s not entitled, and potentially scan the network for vulnerabilities.
It’s basically stealing.
Would you want some device connecting to your network that is not under your control?
And before you answer “well, you should lock it down,” yes, that’s true, but we do not blame the victim if they fail to do so. An unlocked door is not an invitation.
I'm not sure if any TVs currently do this, but they could connect to unsecured public WiFi without the user doing anything, if one were available with no password. Fortunately such networks aren't that common most places, but it's not a big leap from the sketchy things LG and other companies do. They could also put SIMs in them if they wanted. Again, I don't know that any do that, but I wouldn't put it past them. I'm not that paranoid, but I don't trust them to be up front and ethical.
A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist. Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
I'm not sure of the current state of it, but a few years back specturm was selling access to a private network based on consumer routers. Tmobile could partner with them so that one of their customers could go through spectrum instead of the cell towers in cases where connections were spotty.
That's exactly the sort of thing I could see LG piggy backing on. Your neighbor might have spectrum so the LG TV connects to it's private network to phone home.
Xfinity/Comcast does the same thing. By default, the router they provide has a separate WiFi network supporting their distributed WiFi service. It's only for their customers, and it's not an open no-password network, but I'm certain they would offer it to any company that paid for access. They also have WiFi APs on telephone poles to broaden coverage.
If you live in a dense city, there's a good chance you can reach an open network. When I lived in midtown Manhattan, there were around 500 SSIDs reachable from my apartment.
> A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist.
We use a Kubuntu Linux laptop behind the TV with a wireless mouse and keyboard (for searching and stuff), stream in Chrome, works great. And yes, we trust this combination.
> Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
We don't use Amazon device products just because we use Kubuntu Linux on PC's in our home but yes based on LG's behavior we trust Amazon more and we don't put our LG TV or any of our LG appliances we bought a few years ago, on the Internet.
I’ve had TVs that had important firmware updates that improved hdmi/atmos/etc compatibility
I have a 10-year-old LG TV that runs webOS 3. The first update slowed it down - not that it was particularly fast to begin with - and every subsequent update made it even slower. It also constantly nags you to update the firmware. You can’t just refuse once; every time you turn on the TV, it asks you again. I won’t make the same mistake the next time I go shopping for a TV.
Forgot to mention - there were no improvements whatsoever in terms of functionality.
Yeah, I find the LGs to be really annoying. The Sony seems to be much better.
Agreed. I leave my tv disconnected from the internet, and connect my Apple TV instead… the default UX on most tvs is so much slower and add-riddled than Apple’s
What about the part where it's the consumers obligation to notify guests or people passing by that LG is recording and saving their voices for fuck knows what all. They didn't mention that at all.
They also specify "for advertising purposes" in the response. It's pretty selective in that wording because it implies that it may be used for other purposes.
I remember days when Tom's Hardware was doing real hardware reviews. Today it's just another copycat tech page.
It should be Tom's Hardware thing to releal this type of a scam.
I for one completely believe them. That's why I rooted my C5, disabled all telemetry, and disabled Internet access entirely by default from an isolated vlan on my network that has no access to anything on any other network. I'm tempted to remove the WiFi/BT board if it's an add-on card, and probably unplug the microphones as well. I only need it as a display for my PC and 4K disc player.
Any guide to doing this?
easy to prove. Open source your stuff LG.
None of the complaining here has the slightest chance of changing anything.
The only way these companies get put in their place is if their products are used to exfiltrate the video or audio of a powerful politician doing something compromising.
Here in Australia cops liked to hide behind bushes at the bottom of a hill with a speed camera / radar as a revenue collection exercise. They kept fining politicians speeding between Sydney and Canberra, and used photos as evidence showing said politicians with women other than their wives in the passenger seats. So the rules were changed so every speed camera needs at least three warning signs before you reach it.
Yeah, it’s naked self interest but it’s the only way things get done in the world.
Someone, perhaps a white hat hacker, needs to start hacking into LG TVs and publishing senators’ wives screaming the name of “the help” in ecstasy while the man of the house is in DC. Or post audio of senators accepting bribes. Whatever, use your imagination!
Suddenly, almost miraculously, privacy will matter, LG executives will be dragged over hot coals, some might even go to federal prison over wire tapping or espionage charges. Same as Huawei.
But my mark words, until a Senator feels burning hot shame over something exfiltrated from their TV, exactly zero changes will happen to consumer protection laws.
LG will do damage control for a few days.
By next week you will all forget this.
Nothing will change.
Obligatory reference
https://youtu.be/krj5NM-6tfU
lg trying to spin this so hard the earth rotation may stop
So what? We allow people and corporations to lie under almost all circumstances, including most ads and press releases. Get them under oath, if they still deny spying, that would be a minor news item.
Creepy spyware vendor insists they aren't doing what they were caught doing.
They made customers feel like suckers for trusting the Brand.
Their LG logo was literally on the signed evidence. What a bunch of clowns getting exposed by community reporters. Thanks Steve. =3
So very strange every time I visit Tomshardware.com, I get a pop-up on my iPhone that asked me "Do you want to download "sync-pixel" on "usync.ingage.tech"?
What is that? And why does it only happen on that website?
We need a push notification: "Living room TV wants to use its microphone" and for it to be locked out if you don't allow it.
Leaving TVs disconnected from the internet is the only way to ignore this.
Connect your own devices and smarts to it.
A broader issue is that it does any kind of recording, or processing of the signals around the tv (from a microphone) or what is displayed on the tv (image) is both extremely private.
Privacy has been violated by LG according to their own wording. a way that is not controlled by settings.
What might LG want with an anonymized hash of the audio being played or shown on someone's screen?
Existing ad matching technology can link it with the video of what you're watching to build a shadow profile of you and then sell the attention of your eyeballs to advertising.
From there, simply what you watch, at what time, for how long roughly sets up a wonderful demographic of age, gender, interests, and all that fun stuff. This is an area of tv and video advertisign that has existed for a long time including online and cable tv boxes.
LG's statement that it doesn't move your info anywhere about what is being watched via audio seems to be a variant of this. Using the audio fingerprint, their software could request an ad for it from another system and direction.
So your information may not leave the TV indirectly, but thsi type of a mechanism does exist in cable tv boxes, etc.
With TVs absorbing the OTT (set top box) functions they are absorbing this too so their claims of how big their market is probably tied to being able to sell advertising into that ecosystem.
It’s likely an unadvertised function only for the benefit and leverage of LG and may be buried in signing your life away to use their “smart” tv functions as well.
A tiny crack in LG tvs can be an attack vector for security and safety. Whether it's audio, or video, or anything.
The best TV is a dumb tv, with all internet disabled and plug in your own smarts that you can hopefully manage better.
A brand is a promise of an experience. This brand has broken a promise and it can’t be pretending it didn’t.
>LG denies TV spying claims
Yeah, they fucking *would*.
We're listening. We hear you. We're hear for you.
The ACR stuff was turned on by default for mine. They are straight up lying.
LG can't deny the clips of their sociopathic executives saying things like "we own there glass" and "within an LG TV household we can help extend the ad campaign footprint to the other devices in the household"
It doesn't matter whether they deny specific methods when their execs are quoted giving specific outcomes that require literal spying.
Fuck off LG, and the rest of you doing the same shit.
Wolf claims they are utterly interested in eating sheep, news at 11
Sounds like these TVs will not get much sales in the US and they will be put on sale at a discount in countries with a lower gdp per capita.
I.e: these will probably trickle down to me
damn LG doing what now!
What astounds me most of all from all this research is how much ownership LG (and through similar legal means, most manufacturers out there) asserts over the device you might have just paid thousands of dollars for - including the physical goods inside. This isn't merely an issue of corporate overreach and mass surveillance, it's a complete and utter failure of policy to adapt to shifting markets or preserve consumer agency.
Maybe an answer is a stripped-down Linux distro for smart TV chipsets that let users clearly disable said features entirely? Since I doubt anyone is going to willingly "go back" to dumb displays when so much data and ad revenue is on the line.
So logically, one side must be lying. Somehow LG's outlet here doesn't convince me.
Imagine here the goose and a jacket guy meme, where the goose says "Why then you have so many microphones in it? Why so many microphones!?"
yeah but what about third party analytics packages that may be abusing enterprising or privileged credentials
I think this is all disingenuous and will stay that way until the public asks the right questions to the right people
the CEO of the obvious organization can go in front of Congress and truthfully say “Senator, we are not listening, targeting is based on browsing patterns and data brokers”
while the targeted ads and timelines remain based on all those other inputs, and also audio
And Michael Scott declares bankruptcy. Newsworthy?
Bold from the verge, as clicking the link to go to the official statement took me through 3 redirect trackers as picked up by my browser/extensions (I think ubo to be specific)
It might be reasonable for a new source you don’t pay for to make money from advertising. Not so, the company that sells you a tv
What are you talking about? The linked article is from Tom’s Hardware…
Huh. I didn't know you could change the URL. It used to point to https://www.theverge.com/tech/994333/lg-responds-to-tv-spyin...
Everyone complains but realistically TVs are so incredibly cheap now, I can't believe anyone would make money from hardware alone. I mean a Samsung 55in 4k tv for $300 delivered for free is crazy, let alone the $179 insignia one.
Yes. The Gamers Nexus video points out that in some cases LG makes more money from selling your behaviour to ad partners, than on the hardware itself.
I'd rather pay full price.