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LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

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Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#301

Post by RetroTechie »

Silhouette wrote: post #274
alt227 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On LG TVs there are about 5 separate agreements you need to accept. You dont need to accept them all to use the tv, but in the initial setup LG puts a handy 'Accept All' button front and center, which agrees to all 5 incrluding the unnecessary ones and turns on the ACR feature. This is the dark pattern most people are pissed about.

But again the real question is why a TV should need users to accept any kind of post-sale agreement at all to be used normally (meaning "as reasonably expected and/or explicitly advertised"). Maybe the simplest solution is to pass a consumer protection law that completely nullifies any such post-sale agreements and makes pre-sale agreements enforceable only if they have massive prominence and standardised warnings on…

I'm no lawyer, but afaik so-called "shrink-wrap" licence agreements, where vendor would like people to believe you've agreed by buying & using the product, are null & void legally speaking. Primarily because there's no way to say "no" before unboxing the product.

It's okay to ASK for permissions afterwards, if user can decline. But if such permissions are required to use the device normally, then the proper course of action is decline, if product then fails to do its job, take it back to store as broken & demand money back (no, coupons won't do!). Any seller refusing at that point would have a hard time avoiding legal repercussions should you decide to pursue it.

That is: in countries with reasonable consumer protection laws (like EU).

Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#302

Post by corysama »

Wistar wrote: post #144
BeetleB wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible. It apparently is. Do you know the Nielsen Ratings? That's exactly how they know what people are watching these days. I've been contacted by them to be one of their subjects. They ship you a device that listens and recognizes based on content. They look for certai…

The Shazam app on my wife’s iPhone can identify TV shows and movies very quickly, sometimes nearly instantly. Not sure how it does that.

I know a guy who made a Shazam-like phone app that can listen to a few seconds of noisy audio and make a fingerprint that can be used to quickly ID those specific few seconds out of a pre-fingerprinted archive of an enormous amount of audio (zillions of hours of TV). Making the fingerprint requires a tiny amount of very smart code (in C with no dependencies). But, the fingerprint is not useful for understanding audio that's not in the archive.

Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#303

Post by gerdesj »

LG TVs boot Linux and have plenty of capabilities. Why would they not ... take a look around at the environment ... to best enhance ... your errr experience.

LG are amongst equals here. I've seen devices (TVs/cameras) do ping sweeps and then port scans.

I have two VLANs at home: THINGS for IoT and SEWER for things that look really dodgy.

I drive a (Seic) MG4 EV. I use the Home Assistant integration for that and put up with the rest. To be fair I live in the UK and we are quite efficiently ... observed.

Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#305

Post by corysama »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #284
dylan604 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV shows are completed and in the can well before air date. It is entirely plausible that the interested party in having the content identifiable by Shazam like services submit whatever needs to be submitted for new content

I have also wondered about the possibility of media emitting some kind of hidden identifier. Can normal speakers emit noise outside of human hearing that could contain a unique id? Would not even need to be a lot of data that could be broadcast.

That's not necessary. If a service has access to the raw audio of a show, it can fingerprint each second of that audio in a way that can be matched in a tiny amount of computation even for a recording in a noisy environment.

That can't recognize what you say. But, it can ID where you are in a specific show out of zillions of hours of shows.

Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#306

Post by bluefirebrand »

ryandrake wrote: post #295
imoverclocked wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what about all the cloud enabled spyware? How would that work? (/sarcasm) Truly though, smart-home stuff runs the whole gamut of privacy and device manufacturer relationships. eg: I have used three different smart/room AC units: - one requires its own cloud-enabled app for any remote connectivity, no HomeKit integration - one integrates with HomeKit but then leaves an upgrade hint that can only be done through a…

Manufacturers just need to realize that LANs exist and allow their devices to be used with the Internet turned off. When I'm sitting in my home and I want to turn off the AC unit in the other room or close my garage door, there's no reason I should have to do an IP roundtrip to the manufacturer's server. Both devices are on my LAN. They should just talk to each other. This has been a solved problem for decades.

I have been toying with the idea of building some kind of "home cloud" that hooks into all of your smart devices (at least all of the open devices that it can), allows photo backups from mobile devices, idk. Stuff like that.

Something you can just scan a QR code with your phone and it hooks it into your backups so your "cloud backup" is sitting in your utility room at home instead of being "someone elses computer"

Obviously this is all achievable by a savvy techie, but I'm thinking along the lines of a black box any idiot can use.

The idea is very appealing to me, I would love to decentralize "the cloud" for your average person.

And if it were possible to get one of these in every house and apartment, then the idea of a "smart home" starts to really click in ways it doesn't right now. Your smart home would have a "home cloud" box that acts as the brain

Idk. I think there's a product idea here somewhere but ultimately it's just something I'm kicking around now and then.

Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#307

Post by trinsic2 »

wongarsu wrote: post #216
seemaze wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any useful resources for finding devices that don't have surveillance apparatus built in? I'm still not purchasing a television. The last thing I need is more screen time in my life.

You'd be looking for what's now called a "dumb tv". But those are getting rare, because TVs that can't sell your watch data have to be more expensive to make up for that, and that doesn't sell. Commercial screens are an option, as are computer monitors. Or getting a smart tv and never connecting it to the internet. So far nobody has started shipping TVs with a mobile connection to exfiltrate data, as far as we know.…

I think it would be less time consuming to build one yourself.

Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#308

Post by dgellow »

lrvick wrote: post #239
josephg wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It’s also horrible that they have microphones in your home listening to your conversations. LG knowing what I’m watching is awful, but it seems even worse for LG to listen in to the conversation I have with my loved ones about it after. I don’t want to be under surveillance in my own home.

The good news is there is no good reason to plug the TV into the internet.

To watch movies from a streaming service?

Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#309

Post by hdgvhicv »

HPsquared wrote: post #204
hdgvhicv wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they shouldn’t bother selling the TVs at all? When they spend 400 on a tv and sell it for 410 and sell the data for 40 it doesn’t mean the data makes 4 times as much as the tv. The cost of gathering that data is still 400, they have nothing to sell without spending 409 in the hardware.

It seems conditions are such that the TV selling business is worthless (i.e. unprofitable) without collecting the data, and the TV data collection business can't work without selling TVs.

Or just sell the tv for a higher price rather than using it as a loss leader?

Re: LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

#310

Post by hananova »

tredre3 wrote: post #256
cassianoleal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any case, "We don't record continuously" is still recording. They should not be recording at all!

Enough with the knee jerk reactions. They have to record in some cases. You don't have to like those features, but plenty of people want those features. - The television has voice control. - The television has a manually triggered speech-to-text feature so you don't have to type with tv remote.

You simply do not say something like “we don’t record continuously” if the reality is that you only record when voice control or speech to text is active. Given the entire industry’s track record, the only sane thing to do when confronted with weasel wording is to assume the truth is the worst possible interpretation that isn’t a blatant lie, and even then, sometimes it is just a blatant lie.

Here’s some examples:

- We don’t record continuously -> We record nearly all the time, only stopping to upload the recording.

- We do not sell your data -> But we do “share” it.

- All your data is protected from unauthorized LLM scraping -> But we define all the big tech companies as authorized scraping.

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