This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
all smart tvs do this! they've been doing it for a decade at this point! I've been saying never to connect your tv to your internet for the past decade because of this stupid shit that's only coming out now.
never connect your tv to your internet or network. you want to watch netflix? don't use your tv, use an appletv or nvidia shield device!
It’s weird that this is the takeaway from that investigation that big media is pushing.
This is maliciously burying the headline that LG TVS ARE TRANSCRIBING EVERY WORD THEY HEAR IN YOUR HOUSE AND THEY’RE UPLOADING A TEXT LOG OF IT.
Depending on the TOS details, that may very well be a legit crime. Even in 1-party consent states this wouldn't slide because LG isn't a participant in the conversations it's recording, and not everyone talking near a TV has agreed to the TOS.
And even with generous TOS, there's gonna be legal issues. HIPAA, for instance, could really fuck them if the TVs are in a medical facility and are recording and transmitting private medical data without consent of the patients.
It is undeniably a crime. But in Glorious Free Republican America large corporations are exempt from the law.
I think the HIPAA stuff specifically could fuck them HARD. That can be more easily pursued civily. Criminal Courts don't mean much to companies because they have to pay a minor fine and it goes away, because criminal courts don't seek relief or compensation. Civil courts are where corporations can get gigafucked.
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Fucking hell we have two of these at home.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/09/07/disconnect-your-lg-television-from-the-internet-now
I wonder if the next generation will know if you’re watching the advertisements. They’ll probably call it something innocuous, like “auto pause.”
It’s literally just an algorithm applied to the WiFi antenna.
We’re fucked without comprehensive and effective privacy laws.
But they won’t do that. Someone will (dishonestly) argue that TV’s and monitors that can count how many viewers are watching and force everyone in the room to verify their identity when the ACR detects a curse word or breasts is “for the children.”
Fuck buying an LG Tv lmao
Its all of them. The only tvs that aren't doing this are dumb ones. The reason why they're so cheap is that they are selling data. Its been this way for years.
OOoookokokok. This post was the last push I needed to setup vlans on my network.
Go to any mid sized or larger company and run a port scan and you'll be immediately found and taken to the woodshed or fired.
But I guess doing it unannounced in peoples home is just fine.
What about the larger companies with LG tvs in their offices?
They probably buy commercial/display TVs which don't have that garbage.
You wouldn't add them to the network. HDMI to the conf room table or a dedicated phone controller. Maybe an HDMI matrix.
Forget the TV calling home for advertisement info, i'm worried about holes in their screen mirroring and microphone that would let people snoop from the floors above/below me. If we need smart features, we tie them to either real media hardware, or plug them to a small computer.
I'm interested in what they are doing with the information more than anything. It's not unusual for a media device to be using SSDP/UPNP and mDNS, looking for media devices to connect to. Ideally, off by default with a way to enable/disable and not used for advertising.
LG owns an advertising company. Just like Google tracks everything you do on the internet via their analytics and search products and then feeds you targeted ads, LG tracks everything you watch, all the electronics in your house, and any conversations you have nearby, then feeds you ads through their TVs.
Just like google is an advertising company first and everything else second it's probably a good idea to think of LG as an advertising company that happens to have a consumer electronics company bolted on. Their TVs are nothing but trojan horses these days, designed to spy on everything they can and get ads in front of your face.
Mostly targeting advertising. The original source is the GamerNexus video. They show in great details the kind of information they capture and give potential usage for it. For instance they can detect thermostats, air conditioning units and air purifier that may be on the network, products that LG also sells. They give another example: if they see you have an iPhone 13, they may send you ads for the new iPhone 17.
If you can detect and identify the other devices on the LAN, you know exactly which other smart devices the customer has, and at scale that's very valuable market research. They could probably even start sending ads to customers for an LG replacement if a device drops off the network.
On that note, does anybody know a good set top box with DolbyVision support that doesn’t require Amazon or Google services?
Because the only one that comes to my mind would be an AppleTV and I don’t want to believe that’s the least terrible option…
Hate to break it to you, but AppleTV really is the best option.
I haven’t tried it, but I would think that running something shitty like a Roku but gating it with a pi-hole would be reasonable. You just have to make sure that there’s no open networks within reach (neighbors, etc).
the older my Shield gets, the more I end up looking at the apple TV as the least worst of the bunch. until some foss Linux approach gets easy enough for me to be satisfied it won't drive the rest of the household mad, that is
Yup. I went Apple TV for our main TV. Apple TV is easy for rest of the household and isn’t a huge Trojan horse. Retired the shield to the upstairs bedroom.
it's a trojan horse for Apple though right? Apple still collects tons of telemetry they've just never been caught selling it
True. But also, a Linux box at the TV just isn’t practical when you live with normal non technical people. Pick your poison unfortunately. I will say it is behind a pi-hole.
I've been pretty shocked at the "non technical people" who just walk up to our Linux box TV setup, fire up Kodi, navigate the menus and start movies. 10 years ago that NEVER happened, today it's not unusual. Even 15 years ago it was also common that all kinds of TV setups, including "normal" consumer gear, needed a one page "user's guide" that a lot of people still couldn't manage to make work.
I wonder if I could desolder the WiFi chip
If they don't already, they will probably make doing that a kill switch trigger. 🫠
