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216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

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Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the insane part is that this is not criminal and the executives are not jailed for it.

That's exactly why this keeps happening. If I bug your house I'd be charged with all kinds of crimes. If LG does it at scale nothing happens.

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Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

#512

I've bought an LG Smart TV 5 years ago, read t&c where I was supposed to grant them any data they wanted, decided to disagree and kept all network functions disabled. I was ridiculed by my friends for that. At some point, I thought - maybe I'm really crazy to do so? Who am I, a caveman, a luddite? Oh well, I'm not. Not a bad tv though, many HDMI ports!

This. Why would you even connect TV to the network? It is well known for like 5 years. Smsrt TVs go through your movies library, and upload screenshots and filenames to internet. Some will start showing ads after firmware upgrade.

The alternative is inconvenient and more expensive. And most people simply don't care.

Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why this keeps happening. If I bug your house I'd be charged with all kinds of crimes. If LG does it at scale nothing happens.

We need to climb two very difficult hills for there to be any change here: 1. We need our governments to actually start charging companies with crimes, when what they are doing would be illegal for an individual to do, and 2. We need the penalties to be something other than fines, which are ultimately treated by companies as routine costs of business.

So step one is a constitutional amendment to ban corporate money in politics, which is going to be suuuper hard to accomplish.

But yeah similar to how humans are put in jail and it can easily ruin their life, the punishment for a severe crime needs to ruin a company’s life. It’s an absurd double standard.

Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane, but it's not like it's not known, personally, each time we have a party at home with friends, we always unplug the TV for this reason, it's out of doubt but it's normal to doubt as it's proprietary and has a microphone, so it's a bit obvious that it might be recording and processing data somewhere. The same as I would never trust an average phone around if I'm having a private conversation. Blackbox+Mic…

First of all, your TV is not interested in random gibberish from loud parties. It’s just not economically viable. During the Soviet era, not everyone could afford to have a landline phone, but the system kept hunting down its dissidents one by one. If you are a person of interest (which I believe doesn’t apply to you), there are way more important signals to adversaries than your microphone. It's important to choose…

But as the video shows, the TV is doing text to speech and associating audio with a person. That text data is relatively very cheap to hang onto forever.

The problem is really that this tracking is at an absurd scale. So while an individual attacker isn’t targeting you and buying your profile from LG, the data is out there, and once it’s out there, it’s probably easy to get on the dark web if someone did want to do something nefarious. So it’s not just the surveillance capitalism.

Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

#518

I commented this only a few days ago on a different LG related thread. What LG are doing is indefensible and we should all vote with our wallets when considering a new TV... but for those who already own an LG TV you really owe it to yourself to jailbreak it and make it "yours", so to speak. > OpenLGTV[1] is a collective, non-commercial project for legal reverse engineering and research of LG (Smart and non Smart) TV…

thank you for the link!

Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

#519
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Folks, never update a TV firmware unless it's necessary. Why would a TV ever need a firmware update? Either it works out of the box or it doesn't and I return it. I never updated the firmware of my PC monitor either.

security updates ?

Only needed if you connect it to the network. Don't.

Re: 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

#520
post #389

The source video is excellent: https://youtu.be/6IFVTcM28KA I have two LG TVs so this freaks me out a lot. I guess I’m fortunate to have kept their network permanently disconnected (we use Apple TV for smart stuff) but who knows if they don’t do things like scan for open hotspots or connect without permission to networks you previously used to update firmware and then deleted from history. This company needs to be nu…

Probably best to treat the wifi password as compromised and change it after the TV has had access to it. But I suppose there's nothing you can do to prevent it from accessing open wifi networks that happen to be nearby.

I wonder if my LG will change its MAC address. Going to use my router first and just block it. Won't have to wade through that lame “Smart” UI.
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