This turned out to be more ethical than I thought. I'd thought there wasn't any consent at all, or the actual mention of proxying was buried in a 20 page EULA.
Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
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Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#1212 minute article. 70% AI. The only content not flagged? Copy and pasted PR comments. Invisible Unicode characters, triads, unnecessary markdown. Good work, obviated by bloviating. Readers dropping off near-instantly. A company leaving a slop trail behind its wake. AI DDOSing should be shameful. https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
It’s exhausting. It’s like every article is written by the same author and that author is also your coworker and personal assistant and also moonlights as Brian, a waiter at Chotchkie’s.
Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#13Well, that's how data for training LLMs is scraped.
Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#14Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#15I imagine most smart TVs don't support multitasking or apps staying alive in the background, hopefully?
Why would you imagine that? Which non-multitasking OS do you think these devices are based on?
For example OS running on Amazon fire stick 4K kills your background processes after ~20 minutes.
Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#16I imagine most smart TVs don't support multitasking or apps staying alive in the background, hopefully?
Why would you imagine that? Which non-multitasking OS do you think these devices are based on?
Specific to LG tvs:
https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/ap...
Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#17I think it’s worth emphasizing that based on the article, those are third party apps, not first party LG apps. Based on the headline I thought it’s the built-in apps.
This does raise the question if other Smart TVs with the same third party apps have the same issue.
In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.
Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#18This needs to be illegal.
Why? The only thing that's vaguely objectionable is the fact the consent screen's wording of "download public web data from the internet" omits important information on what's actually happening and the associated risks. Otherwise I'm not sure how you can come up with a principled justification of the ban beyond just "AI scrapers bad" or "hiding identity". Tor relays and VPNs are basically doing the same thing, except with clearer disclosure about what actually goes on.
Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#19This turned out to be more ethical than I thought. I'd thought there wasn't any consent at all, or the actual mention of proxying was buried in a 20 page EULA.
Yeah, this does seem somewhat reasonable. I get that most users will probably accept it without thinking twice, but if you’re going to do something like this, this is at least a fairly upfront and consenting way of doing it. For the TV platforms where this isn’t allowed, you have to wonder if apps are still doing it but just completely secretly, and trying to hide their tracks as well.
Re: Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
#20Walked past a TV and it was advertising a security guard.
Why does a TV need security software?