alt Hacker News216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
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As an owner of a (2020?) LG WebOS TV, to what degree can I fight this? Any point in trying Pihole with targeted blocking of certain IPs?
has anyone tried to pwn an lg smart tv using a coding agent? would love to turn mine into a dumb tv.
I hate this. I hate having to be scared of every damn piece of technology spying on me. Of everything becoming a subscription. Of everything being sold to the highest bidder to be enshittified and gutted leaving a wake of low quality trash. This isn’t the future I worked for. This is a flea market for the Epstein class.
Why does that company still exist?
Just don't by anything from LG. It's easy.
The only appliance that should come from the factory with a microphone is the telephone.
Every smart TV is dumb if you don’t connect it to a network
where could this heavy privacy infringement be reported in EU?
should we all report this illegal behaviour and contract terms?
What kind of access can the government get, I wonder...
Goddamnit, I have an LG TV. The panel panel itself is beautiful, but the software is complete shit and I only use an apple TV on it.
The snakes in charge of this should be thrown in jail. They talk about "owning the glass and the living room" and you can just tell they've sold out their soul long ago.
All devices in my home sit behind adguard. The TV can try all it wants.
Is there a site showing us where to drill?
I've had several conversations about this over the years, usually about the EU and how they keep harping on Apple (for instance) because it's a highly visible brand while they completely ignore LG (and others) and their massive data collection devices that (by the way) are in every single European institution.
And many government officials' households, too.
Just saying.
Pihole blacklist, would it be enough to mitigate this?
My LG C5 is in a separate VLAN, with no access to the rest of my home network. I've never accepted the terms and conditions, and I don't need anything from it other than to be a display for my 4k player and PC. I guess now I'm going to remove Internet access from it altogether!
The thing I'd like is if the remote didn't have 4 buttons for crappy streaming services I will never use, but instead had 4 buttons to select the HDMI inputs directly; but no, I have to press a button, wait for the stupid laggy UI to load, navigate or point and click at input I want, then do the same to the preview window. A tedious pain in arse for basically the one main thing I use the remote for. It annoys me no end, and it seems to me that the last thing LG care about is the UX; they've put all their efforts into underhand and user-hostile profiling.
I also have a Roku Ultra for streaming, which I very rarely use. I don't expect they treat their users any better and they use ACR too
Can we please agree on calling devices with a cpu and os that spy on the owner smart? I personally think that closed operating systems with spyware is quite dumb for user privacy.
Send the PMs that greenlit this to jail.
"we own the glass" "We own the living room"
How disrespectful one can be towards its customers. I am honestly disgusted by such behaviour. I know the cheeky confidence biz talk, but is that really what you want your customers to hear? And what about the guys making such disgusting business possible. Is that what you want to build?
the only TV I have connected to the home network (guilty, I admit), Sony OLED 65, ARP floods my network about 12-15 hours after "turning off". On a plus side, it doesn't appear to be streaming anything out: no local DNS hits, not enough outgoing traffic for any meaningful audio stream
The choice between privacy concerns and ineptly coded network stack is tough. But that's the choice we're forced to have
wow i'm surprised sn0wd3n only revealed this about 20 years ago
notebookcheck.net:
> We value your privacy
Shares my browsing info with 1745 "partners" with no clear way to opt out (which ought to be opt-in by the way to be compliant with ePrivacy and GDPR).
Another proof of how much our data is worth. But I think they make a loss on me, I can remember only a handful occasions that I bought something based on an ad I saw, which were more informative than seductive, like a monthly bike rental service.
But I guess they still sell my data. I wish they would flag the data of rational people like me as "worthless", and not sell my data.
SKorean intelligence on China (and Japan). This will not be easily regulated. The intelligence value is huge.
"Samba unites TV, digital, and behavioral data through AI to power faster, more accurate media decisions. We help the world’s leading brands and agencies reach the right audiences, measure real outcomes, and access signals no one else has."
These are spy devices. It is sad that the industry has become so addicted to sniffing - the problem I see is that they can no longer stop doing so, as they built an additional network around that yielding money to them.
What will we do when these devices start shipping with their own sim cards and we can’t simply just not connect them to WiFi?
Clearly the penalties for this are not high enough, because the scumbags keep doing it.
Vizio TVs were caught taking screen grabs and phoning those home years ago.
Why I don’t have a tv
Serious question: why are people so infuriated by Flock cameras but just completely shrug at this (much worse) TV thing?
I want the public to get upset about this.
Also, can anyone articulate exactly what data the TV is scraping about your other network devices? IP, name, what else?
Cool when having 3 LG tvs in our office
I wonder if this applies to large LG Monitors too.
This is also why I won't buy any watch with a microphone
Even if the manufacturer doesn't do something evil, they may have an exploit or allow 3rd party apps that do whatever
Garmin literally keeps the microphone on 24/7 listening for "OKAY GARMIN"
There should be a consumer law that any device with a microphone must have an LED physically in series so that if the mic has power, the LED is lit, not software control of the LED which can be disabled. Europe might do that someday but unless California does it too it will never happen in USA
Extremely concerning!
A friend was working at an adtech company over a decade ago, processing smart tv data. Needless to say he advised buying the dumbest tv possible.
If tech giants could stop trying to make the telescreens from Nineteen Eighty Four for five fucking seconds, that'd be great.
This is a known feature that is not hidden which is not automatically turned on by default.
You must set your TV to a different standby mode and enable LG voice control.
When you do this, it very plainly tells you that it can listen with the screen off so you can control the TV with voice.
Failure of User Awareness, not some nefarious spyware.
I'm so disappointed at the lack of dumb TVs and privacy focused streaming boxes.
Why are people so infuriated by Flock cameras but just completely shrug at this (much worse) TV thing?
Nothing is going to change until people are that enraged by it.
I posted two comments on similar threads recently. This is only going to get worse.
> Not long until companies partner with Amazon and others to send traffic automatically through their near-by devices like smart speakers, disconnecting will be impossible.
Not surprised if this is happening already. I don't want to remove radios out my TV..
> Samba, a media intelligence company have several partnerships with manufacturers to take screenshots and collect metadata.
Viewer analytics are valuable to companies like Samba, they aren't the only ones. Laws ASAP, these companies will lobby hard to stop anything of the sort.
That was a long two hours. 15 minutes longer than two hours actually. It was well spent overall since Gamers Nexus covered the privacy intrusions that LG has built into the OS for their smart TV line and likely all of their other smart home devices. "We own the glass" and "we own the living room" don't tell the whole story.
The enshittification of TV ownership and usage through smart TVs and the apps and other software that runs without user knowledge is a huge problem wherever these devices are sold. The TVs track and log every device on owner networks - smart watches, thermostats, smart phones, etc, anything that uses wireless or that accesses the internet from inside the home.
I am so glad that I have avoided "upgrading" our TV, almost montly, for years now by simply sending all the Best Buy texts to spam or deleting them. The best way is to opt out of Best Buy communications and after watching that video I will do that.
Our TV is a Panasonic plasma TV from 2012. I need to exit the last streaming service that we subscribe with and that will get it set to an OTA device used when weather int he area is bad enough that having that real-time local weather channel adds value.
From the video - RCE vulnerabilities could allow anyone to drop code on your TV that enables them to use it as a surveillance device. Lots of microphones in the device and no way for the user to disable them. The TV is listening all the time and, using the very sensitive microphones, can detect and record voices in conversations happening in other rooms more than 60' distant. They are effectively whole-house listening devices probably using MEMS microphones due to excellent sensitivity of the devices. Users are fingerprinted and everyone in the house can be identified, even children and those who are frequent enough guests to have been ID'd. Everything that happens triggers the recording.
I suspect Amazon's and Google's devices were the same with their voice triggers. LG does not allow the user to disable that functionality even after the user has disabled it (apparently) through the deeply buried menu option.
LG pushes updates to TVs that improve the tracking ability for LG and their "partners", which includes Microsoft through MS's ownership of Nuance. LG tried to separate their data collection/advert business to circumvent restrictions on ...
Man there is so much there. Fortunately the only LG product I own is a dumb monitor. I will be contacting relatives to offer advice about what to do with their smart devices, LG or others, so I know this starts another round of investigation for me.
No Samsung or LG at my house. Almost done canceling subscription-based "services" like TV content and gaming (XBox) stuff. I don't have software subscriptions so that's great. And, I should be finished with MS OSes pretty soon and flipped to Linux on new devices.
A lot of the shit and shit infrastructure that some of you build is destructive. One day, you will get your just desserts after shafting people with Binding Arbitration agreements, huge TOS and Privacy Policies, and other types of enshittifying end results.
It seems Alex Jones was right again
People have always said the idea of the devices listening to conversations was all a conspiracy theory.
Welp, looks like it is a fact.
I mean, I’m not disagreeing, but it’s a bit rich for a site that logs data to 1,745 “partners” to be complaining too much.
Why does anyone trust any device? The surveillance capitalism is just sleepwalking towards disaster, but nobody cares because of the pretty screen and the goddamn brainrot content.
Ad executives in early 2010s took note of the public response to whistleblowing of the NSA PRISM program and Edward Snowden leaks.
10+ years later, this is their response. They have learned a large majority of people just don't give a shit. We are sheep. A majority of people just want "cheap" shit, no matter the cost.
This world is cooked man. Need an asteroid to wipe this planet clean, bro.
Is there a list of which LG tvs do this?