Earlier this week, Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers detailed some alarming findings about how LG’s TVs are logging and uploading data on its users. Now the company is pushing back against those allegations, saying that “Some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work.”
LG released a statement in which it claims that its “TVs do not continuously record or transmit users’ conversations,” and that wake-word detection is all processed locally. However, the word “continuously” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as Gamers Nexus demonstrated an LG TV keeping extensive logs of ambient conversations long after one would assume its AI assistant had stopped listening.
I saw the video of Gamer’s Nexus… Man is like 10 times worse than I thought…
So, their fix for spying is gaslighting?
They’re not trying to fix the spying, they’re trying to fix the accountability.
Always has been.
TL;DW: LG is using very weasely wording to misrepresent what they’re doing, and GN calls their bluff (with data and receipts)
If they were actually wrong about anything, LG would be suing the pants off them right now.
Instead LG are “debunking” claims that weren’t actually made.
Exactly this.
If any of GN’s claims were false, it’d be a very serious case of false allegations. LG could easily sue them, win quickly, get a couple million dollars in damages, and more.
The fact that they’re not suing tells us all we need to know.
Yeah, even then lots of times courts are used in asymmetrical economic situations against the smaller party so not always a tell with shitty actors.
We investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing.
After the recent controversies, I added a bunch of blockers for LG trackers to my pi-hole, to stop my 8 year old TV from collecting data. It blocked a lot at first, but then suddenly nothing, I investigated a bit and saw that it had started sending only to their Vietnamese servers, which were missing from my blocklist.
Make sure you block all regions!
It might help a few people if you shared the domains you blocked.
I looked up the domains registered by logitech electronics and logitech corp.
Blocked the hell out of those.In case anyone is interested: https://github.com/Appoxo/Ad-Spam-Blocklist/blob/master/hosts.txt
Forgive me for using GitHub
Are Logitech involved in this too?
Not sure what Logitech has to do with it?
But sure, block their spyware too (logi+ options)I looked up the domains registered by logitech electronics and logitech corp.
Blocked the hell out of those.Sorry, you brought them up.
“Logitech Electronics”. Autocorrect?
No, brainfart ;)
Is there a good way to see if you are affected by this based on your model? Is the microphone in the TV itself, the remote, or both?
Not addressing the other areas amounts to confirmation
“Misleading” can be such a telling wiggle word.
“allegations”? the thing they state to do to in their EULA, privacy agrement and whatcer other garbage no one reads? what else now? google spies on you? apple spies on you? water is wet?
Hearing about it is one thing. Seeing someone put it to the test and showing the extent of the surveillance and data harvesting is another.
Yet another company going “NO WE DIDN’T”, expecting us to believe.
Gamers Nexus: We’ve documented the entire process. There’s irrefutable proof demonstrating that your TVs log conversations.
LG: Nuh-uh.
“Nuh-uh”
- PR department
“We investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong.” -LG
“Nuh-uh” - LG
They’re adding a forced arbitration clause to their upcoming ToS, clearly the actions of innocent people
Luckily forced arbitration is not legal in the EU.
Because it’s a civilized place not whatever the USA is
this is fine, everyone file seperately
I don’t dispute that, but can you point to the relevant law?
A pre-dispute contractual clause that removes those consumer jurisdiction rights is generally restricted.
Separately, under the EU Unfair Contract Terms Directive, a standard term that effectively excludes or hinders a consumer’s ability to take legal action can be considered unfair and therefore not binding on the consumer.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1993/13/2022-05-28/eng
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A62019CJ0519
One thing I think a lot of people tend to miss when dealing with executive interviews, PR statements, and company advertising is that often times how a company defines a given term and how the actual dictionary and everyone in the world defines that term are not the same thing unless it is legally required.
Textbook examples:
Telsa, Musk, and self driving: Musk and Tesla define it as essentially what everyone else called lane assist. Then they have “full self driving” for what is supposed to be the thing everyone else would think of as self driving.
OpenAI, Sam Altman, and AGI (artificial general intelligence): No one in the AI industry has an agreed upon definition of what AGI even means. The AI labs just throw it out there for hype and funding rounds and tweak the meaning to them as they need. To most normal people I would suspect AGI means “a machine that knows its a machine and is at least as smart as the average person”.
Point being when LG says “ its TVs do not continuously record or transmit users’ conversations,” that can mean literally anything they can twist human communication methods to mean in their specific context. And it is usually the one that makes them the most money.
at least as smart as the average person.
Ooooh. So that’s why they’re eroding public education: to make AGI achievable sooner!
PR statements always make me think of the sample sentence “I never said you did that,” which can have different implications depending on which word is emphasized.
It’s time we all start speaking lojban.
“its TVs do not continuously record or transmit users’ conversations”
Because we all know voice activation isn’t a thing…
It’s not continuous if certain things have to happen for it to start…
North Korea must be having a field day talking about what it sees as Southern chaebol capitalism hypocrisy.
Darn, they are better at mass surveillance than we are. Damn oligarchic capitalism.
Heres the thing. Its exceptionally easy to see where packets are going on most routers. IP to IP or otherwise.
So yeah, things are going out when you plug in an LG tv. So dont buy it.
I have two of them…but I only use them for streaming from my plex server so they’re completely isolated from the internet. As far as I’m concerned I’m happy if it never connects to the internet.
But no, next TV will most definitely not be an LG… Though I’m not sure what the options are, all TV’s are smart TV’s these days… Fuck it, maybe I’ll just find a 65" dumb monitor and put it on the wall.
Apparently the TV searches for anything to connect to still send the data.
Here’s the fun part. It doesn’t matter. If it finds any open Wi-Fi then it will connect and upload. And it’s constantly looking
Did you known with the LG engineering remote you can disable the wifi completely?
And the remote can be had on amazon for about $20.
I need a -separate- remote to control my TV functions?
To hit the engineering level functions, yes. (Same thing you use to program it when you replace the motherboard, which I also had to do a few months ago)
I probably have to look at corporate monitors because those should include no bloatware (or spyware) because they arent subsidized by ads (hopefully)
But they also do not care about picture quality beyond brightness, if at all.
Got one used and it’s really great! Also has some nice niche nerd features.
Need examples what to look forward to. :)
Lots of stuff for remonte control mainly
Ah, neat!
From looking around out of curiosity when this stuff about LG TVs came out, Samsung sells explicitly Non-Smart 65" Hospitality Displays, but they cost $1030 (US), which is over twice as much as their consumer TV with the same specs.
Also somebody pointed out Spectre TVs (which seem to only be sold in the US, and I couldn’t really find an European equivalent, the closest being a Spanish brand whose largest non-smart TV is only 40").
I couldn’t actually find any large dumb monitor except for the ultra-wide curved ones, but I only looked around for half a hour or so.
Personally, the way I already use my TV (wired to a Mini-PC running Linux and Kodi, which has Series and Movies as video files as well as using free IPTV for live TV, and I even have a wireless remote for it so it’s used just like you would a traditional media player or Smart TV) is already perfect for a dumb monitor.
(A more straightforward way to get a privacy respecting setup like this would be to install LibreELEC on something like a Pi or a Mini-PC and get the same kind of wireless remote as I have - my setup is only as it is because I didn’t know about LibreELEC back when I put it together plus it also works as a home server as well as my home NAS, since an N100 Mini-PC is very overpowered to just work as a Media Player).
It really seems that the only way to keep at least some privacy is to ditch corporate devices altogether and just put together your own media player box (which, as I wrote above, is pretty straightforward with something like LibreELEC).
They cost more because the cheaper tvs are subsidised by flogging your data
but they cost $1030 (US), which is over twice as much as their consumer TV with the same specs.
Subsidized by ads, makes it cheaper. Personally I am willing to pay it (to some degree)
I couldn’t actually find any large dumb monitor except for the ultra-wide curved ones, but I only looked around for half a hour or so.
Chromecasts are not able to cope with anything other than 16:9. :(
(A more straightforward way to get a privacy respecting setup like this would be to install LibreELEC on something like a Pi or a Mini-PC and get the same kind of wireless remote as I have - my setup is only as it is because I didn’t know about LibreELEC back when I put it together plus it also works as a home server as well as my home NAS, since an N100 Mini-PC is very overpowered to just work as a Media Player).
What does it matter if TVs like LG do ACR on HDMI content?
For actual privacy it requires at the very least a display with nothing other than hardware to decode a video signal.Oh yeah, you want dumb everything else beyond the little box that you control which has the “smarts” and something like Linux and Kodi on it.
Even having Windows on that box would pretty much guarantee you have no privacy.
As it so happens, in my experience of over a decade using Media Players to play videos on my TV (since well before Android TV and Smart TVs) it’s even the most economic option: the life-cycle of the hardware that plays videos is a lot tighter than the life-cycle of the actual display - unless you’re running after the bleeding edge, you more often have to replace the video playing hardware because it doesn’t support newer video codecs than then display - so it’s cheaper to have those things be separate so that you don’t have to replaced the whole thing every few years just because the cheaper part - the processor - can’t decode newer codecs and instead can just replace the “smarts” and not spend any money on the stuff that still works fine (and is actually more expensive).
Further, if one does like I do and actually use that box for more things (my Media Player Mini-PC is also a home server and home NAS), that’s yet another way that such a setup ends up being cheaper because it’s being used to do the work of 2 or 3 things.
I suspect even if one pays twice as much for a non-smart “Hospitality Display” to have alongside your own self-made Media Player box, it’ll still end up cheaper because in 5-10 years’ time that display will still be just fine even while that box might need upgrading due to new video codecs.
I have a 43 inch samsung hospitality tv on the merchant ship I work on and it’s the absolute worst display made since… The brightness is beyond terrible, colors are beyond dull and the speakers have more in common with the nokia 3310 than anything made past 2007.
Don’t bother. Find a decent tv where you can remove the wifi functionality from physically or via software (jailbreaking, service remotes and such).
Also I was in japan and some hotels actually had some decent custom software (eg. "Hospitality) tvs that might be able to be found … Somewhere.
Has anyone with an open WiFi been close enough to your house for the TV to see it? Because that thing is scanning all the time trying to find open internet access.
My next one will probably be a Sony
Still hard to see what is actually sent since it’s all over encrypted channels. To some extent you can look at the amount of data that is being sent and infer from that what might be actually transmitted. Say if the amount of data seems to match what is expected of uploading voice recordings.
…okay? So the conclusion is don’t buy anything that communicates over the internet?
unless you have the savvy to block everything yourself, yes.
