alt Hacker NewsHere are LG's contract terms for appliances.[1] They are awful.
Not only can they listen in. You have a contractual requirement to tell everyone in range of an appliance that they may be eavesdropped upon.
CONSENT REQUIREMENT: You acknowledge and agree that it is your sole responsibility to obtain all necessary consents from any third parties whose voices may be captured by the Product and to notify household members and guests that their voices may be captured and processed, in compliance with applicable wiretapping, eavesdropping, and privacy laws. If anyone does not consent, you should disable the microphone or voice features in the settings. LGE disclaims any liability for your failure to obtain such consent or provide such notification.
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What's absurd is that this doesn't void the terms by default. There should be limits to what companies can put in their ToS beyond which those terms aren't enforceable.
tempted to go into my nearest big box electronics store and then sue them when they don't tell me the LG tv's they have on display are eavesdropping on me.
I have an LG TV. It has been pestering me with those licensing agreements from time to time, but interestingly enough, I was only required to agree to fairly reasonable basics, everything else I just ignored and left for later.
I'm guessing this is an oversight and the TV does record, but then this is criminal. But, nobody will bother to prosecute them I guess...
Can that kind of clause really be enforceable? It really doesn't seem legal in any jurisdiction I'm aware of. (not a lawyer)
Is that actually for smart tvs? The first paragraph includes "the products you may access or otherwise connect to via the ThinQ mobile application (not including Smart TVs)" and "These Terms of Use do not apply to any other LG products or services, including Smart Media Products."
[EDIT] Smart Media products terms appear to be at https://us.lgappstv.com/main/terms (for comparison here's UK: https://gb.lgappstv.com/main/terms, there are some other EU versions available for e.g. Germany but I imagine UK terms should be quite close and more accessible for most of readers)
When do you get to see these terms?
The discussion seems to imply that they are seen only after purchase (I haven't read the article).
If that is so they are void and unenforceable in most jurisdictions as you cannot agree to something in a contract that you cannot read.
Are such terms enforceable in the US?
But isn't it the same as Facebook letting you consent (without actually reading the ToS) that your friends on that freshly-uploaded photo agreed to appear online and have their face scanned?
Imagine being the lawyer signing this off. Imagine being the head of product signing this off.
What were they thinking? And most importantly: what TV are they using at home?
Can you actually even turn and keep the microphone off or does it toggle itself back on like Apple's Wifi and Bluetooth one-touch toggle off for now buttons?
I wonder how much money LG makes from all of these practices, and if they stopped doing it what impact to cost of a TV would be?
What about the stores where the TV is sold?
And yet what lawmakers focused on was getting your consent for a cookie on a website you were only going to visit once.
It just reads as legal boilerplate. How else can voice recognition listen for a wake word without being able to process everything it hears.
IANAL but without concent I think LG is comitting a crime here. The owner who ostensibly agreed to obtain concent through the ToS might be breaking their agreement, but wouldn't that be a separate issue?
ToS and other click licenses have been making shit up for way too long.