An investigation by Gamers Nexus found LG smart TVs sweep local networks to map phones and nearby devices. Tests also showed the sets can capture microphone audio with the screen off — they then upload data once reconnected to the internet.
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Every day I’m grateful I bought a screen and not a “smart” TV
This is a felony in most 2 party consent states.
Life’s gulag.
In most cases, its in a small enclosure or just screwed in. Its exactly like a NVME SSD, if youve built a computer before
EU really should regulate against this kind of behaviour
Problem us that there are too few tech literate politicians
The problem is way worse: big tech
contributes tobribes politicians to vote according to industry interests.Problem is lobbying.
ding-ding-ding
AKA legal corruption
The problem is the system that allows for corruption to exist in the first place.
It’s not the politicians job to know everything but to make decisions and legislate based on information from the expertise. It is the people in the know that need to make the proposals for the politicians to bring it up. It’s us, the tech literate, that need to write proposals that are informative with arguments derived from trusted sources to make the politicians aware that these are concerns that need to be addressed.
Sadly, I don’t have time or money to do that. You know who does? Big tech does!
Let’s all lie belly up and do nothing and accept that nothing will ever change for the better because nobody else is doing it for us and it is impossible for us to change the world all alone. This is exactly the defeatist mindset that the economic elites want people to have.
You could do something small, like find out your representatives and write a personal mail to them, informing them from your point of view. With enough people doing small things and some doing big things the chances for things like this gaining traction are magnitudes bigger than giving up in advance. It takes a few hours to a few days depending on your dedication and whatever cost coffee is in your area of residence.
It’s so refreshing finding someone with that kind of opinion. I feel less lonely.
I can’t tell if this comment thread is filled with doomer basement dweller defeatists that use their worldview as excuse to not even try or foreign bot farms pushing said agenda.
It can be both.
Yeah sorry, it’s not just time and money,but also skill. I’m not the person you choose to convince people to do something. That’s why we choose representatives. That’s why we vote.
You have the time. Get off the internet.
Can’t you see I’m working right now?!
The fucked up part is that “expertise” is assumed to be exclusively found in the industry being regulated. Bill Gates is a respected industry expert, but RMS is just some dumbfuck nobody because he’s not “in the industry”.
It is the people in the know that need to make the proposals
No, it’s the politician’s job to get in touch with experts of any given field.
They prefer lobbyists instead because they are corrupt.After proposals come in, yes. If the only proposals coming in are from lobbyists of various corporations and interest groups, guess which matters are going to be on the table?
You’re still portraying the politician as a passive entity, they’re not.
And you seem to think that EU politics is a closed court accessible only for political royalty, which it is not.
It is a politicians job to know what they are doing in fact.
Read at least the entire first sentence before you feel the need to comment, my dude.
Don’t lead with garbage, how about that?
And this, kids, is why reading comprehension is so important. Don’t let media consumption rot your brain into a two second attention span that leaves you confused and angry by information beyond the rudimentary crafted to pander your reality tunnel.
Yes, Timmy you are correct. Before algorithmic video slop, very similar effects were observed from exposure to lead, and that’s why it was phased out of society. That does explain why your gramps is angrily waving his cane at anything complex for which there is no simple solution.
They could educate themselves or hire help, if they weren’t corrupt.
It’s not principally they aren’t tech savy, it s that the politicians are corrupt.
Maybe read what you write? No reason to make yourself look so dumb (and just to state the obvious, I’m not disagreeing at all, just pointing out what should be obvious but apparently isn’t).
EU lobbies won’t ever allow it.
In the later years the EU regulations have been massively disappointing. Only favouring big EU companies and destroying little businesses and the european consumers.
Some disappointing eu regulations:
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The cookiesgate. Your data is still going around everywhere. You just have a pop up everywhere that means nothing.
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¿Replaceable batteries on smartphones? No, only for cheap chinese phones if so. The big players can pay for some european certification on the quality of their batteries and doesn’t need to be replaceable.
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¿Stop killing games? Hahahaha don’t ever think about it.
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You are buying too much, we need you poorer. So we put up a 3€ tariffs per
categoryproduct on chinese stores so you are forced to buy the exact same product to an european retailer at twice the price. -
We heard you like the environment, what about a new complicated tax on packaging so all small business cannot function and only big business are allowed to send products within the european union.
I think the days of the EU legislation saving the day are far off.
on chinese stores
Wrong. It’s on items purchased from any non-EU countries. So it also includes the Irish purchasing from UK.
Implying the British actually make anything the Irish want. Come on now lad. 🤣
Liberalism will always be corrupted by capitalism at the end of the the day. Maybe some systems last a decade or two longer, but it’s all bound to fall.
Liberals ARE capitalists. By definition.
What makes you define the EU as ideologically liberal?
IMHO Liberalism was manufactured by Capitalism as a left-sounding form of politics to allow mainstream parties which were genuinelly leftwing to move Right in Economic, Quality Of Life and even broad Equality whislt still appearing to be left-wing due to their pro-liberty posture on Moral and Social subjects.
I say this because I have yet to see any form of Liberalism in mainstream politics, ever, anywhere, which sought to maximize people’s freedom to access limitied or constrained resources which are required merelly to live, such as Land (which Land Ownership goes against), so I don’t think that at least in Politics there was ever any genuine Liberalism for Capitalism to corrupt.
And yet, they’ve been the best government on the planet for the working class.
That charge is not just on Chinese stores. I manufacture my own product in the usa through a factory i own and get hit with those fucking charges.
Then I’ve got to pay for all this cardboard and plastic but OH LOOK there’s a minimum fee so I’m subsidizing larger businesses or Europeans in general. AND I need to pay for a European contact to do it! Fuck yourselves for that one.
Eu regulation is hostile to small business and they will be left with nothing but major shitty international corps at this rate.
I mean the whole point of this is to subsidize small business in the EU at the expense of businesses outside the EU. The fact it is more difficult and costly for you is exactly the point. They want to support businesses and workers in the EU, because that’s where their people actually are, that’s where their taxes are, that’s where they support infrastructure and social programs.
It is true that it favors larger international corporations, because they have near monopolies and csn manage all of this at a smaller relative cost. The solution of course is to make tariffs and other import duties scale with the size of the company.
So the EU regulations are not perfect, they do hurt international small businesses while protecting in part local small businesses. They need, like everyone, to deal with the problem of international monopoly companies and restore more and more of their manufacturing and product development into more and more local small businesses.
In the USA, you say?
“Oh no”.
Anyway…
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If anyone does, EU will be the first.
Secretly recording conversations in peoples homes sounds like it should be against the law in a number of countries.
Imagine someone working for the government, security services, or a defence contractor. I suspect LG may be in trouble with a number of National Security agencies.
It is illegal. Unfortunately crime is legal for corporations. They just pay the crime fee and can continue undisturbed. Shareholders must be held responsible individually, otherwise it will only get worse.
Shareholders must be held responsible individually
So, are you personally on the hook here because the company managing your pension fund is holding stocks in LG? Because that technically makes you a shareholder as it was bought with your money, right?
Edit: not sure why I get downvoted, this is a legitimate concern/nuance to the debate. The managing company doesn’t own these stocks so they’re not the shareholders, that’s the people whose money they are managing, but these people are not directly in control of the funds. Who is the liable party in this?
The highest level employee/officer who had knowledge of it should be held responsible
you can’t prove they did.
I mean, depending on the scale you probably can with investigation.
Being deliberately ignorant should not be a defense. Just like it isn’t for the peasants.
It doesn’t matter how many layers of evasion there are. Responsibility has to be with individuals in order for there to be change.
The fact that a pension fund can hold shareholds is crazy by itself, also, is the pension found a company or managed by your state? It shouldn’t really be a thing in first placw
is the pension fund a company or managed by your state?
Both in my case, as there are both the government pension fund that is mandatory and the one used by my employer which uses one of the large primary pension institutions in my country.
Is it a bit weird that I don’t just manage all my pensions myself? Yes, a bit. But it’s how its done in my country and it has some tax benefits compared to getting the money in hand and investing myself.
Is it a bit weird that I don’t just manage all my pensions myself?
Naah, at least, i don’t know anyone that does it in my country
Me either. My union pension is controlled by the union and managed by a bank as far as I can tell.
90 percent of stocks are owned by ten percent of Americans. Just throwing this fact out here
That might stop this madness.
See the thing is if your pension also funds a murder company does outsourcing who manages it not make you at least a little culpable? I think it does and i think the only way to stop this madness is for a little justice to come your way.
does outsourcing who manages it not make you at least a little culpable
What if i have no control over who manages it? I have two, one is government managed and mandatory, the other is part of my salary (and mandatory) and who manages my company paid pension is decided by my employer. I have no control of either aside from general risk profile and high level market groups on my company paid pension (e.g. “tech” or “renewable energy”).
That just sounds like a good way to destroy index funds.
Okay.
If I don’t get executive say in what happens at the company, I am not included in liability. I am not allowed to sit on the damn board with my pension fund.
Executives and controlling board members get held personally liable. It really is as simple as that. If you are in the meetings, and you get a vote, you are liable. There is absolutely no slippery slope fallacy here.
Any bullshit “uhm actually you technically are a shareholder” is just trying to ward off people having to take responsibility for their decisions. (also, in many pension schemas you aren’t actually the shareholders, the investment fund technically is and you are just given the license to decide how they invest those funds and get a portion of the payout, but it is different than manually retail investing for example)
Ok, so shareholders shouldn’t be liable after all is what you are saying, only people having a say.
Also, which shareholders? Shareholders have no say in the business decisions outside of the annual voting for board members and whatever broad issues are brought up for a vote. If someone holds stock and then sells it before a vote, are they responsible for the business decisions? If a swing trader bought and then sold in one day/week/month (even at a loss), how much is their liability? If someone sells their shares just before a vote, then buys them again after, are they liable?
Not shareholders. Decision makers. Upper management. Shareholders should pay in share value (the financial penalty to the corporations should be high enough to affect that), bu the personal an criminal responsibility belongs to managers, CEO in particular.
There should at least be something resembling an attempt of investigating, who, where, and when signed an order to implement this shit into their products. That way they will at least think twice if they want to risk the chance of being held personally responsible.
Recording without consent is very much a crime in any two-party state, but my guess is that the TOS that people click past to use the TV gives them permission to record you. If it didn’t, they would be in big legal hot water.
Clicking through ToS does not magically make illegal things legal.
Consenting to recording makes recording legal.
Making that consent required to use the TV or its features and it being buried within lengthy, opaque terms of service in a country with a low level of literacy should be illegal, but it stands in the US because it’s a consumer hostile country.
A TOS presented after an electronic device has been sold is not valid in most of the World since it’s considered an attempt to, after the sale, force a change of the terms of the implicit contract which is the sale.
A company can shove whatever they want in front of the customer as contract conditions they have to accept for a sale before the sale - by which point the potential customer can refuse and not buy or accept and buy - not after.
Of course, they don’t do that because they would lose most sales, so instead there’s a TOS or EULA which the owners of the devices are forced to agree to after the sale to fully enjoy that which they bought, but these are really just legal fictions in most countries.
Mind you, this does not apply to a subscription to an ongoing service, though even then at least in Europe, there are conditions they much obbey to have the customer accept a TOS or a TOS change after subscribing, such as it being possible for the customer to cancel the service at no cost rather than accept the new TOS.
Unconscionable bunk. It’s illegal anyway, just like how you can’t sign a contract to sell yourself into slavery.
If the courts won’t enforce it, vigilantes should.
“In any two-party state” what? That’s such a weird thing to say. Two-party systems are a worse version of applied democracy, that should be incredibly obvious. I just seriously don’t understand why you would even think about saying that it’s a crime in two-party states only, it’s so odd. If anything two-party states are more akin to not having strong laws against that because of the very fact of it. Look at the US, which I’m guessing is a big part of your mind in this. Do yourself a favor and search for countries two-party systems and their laws on this compared to actual democracies with more parties.
Call recording laws in some U.S. states require only one party to be aware of the recording, while other states generally require both parties to be aware. Several states require that all parties consent when one party wants to record a telephone conversation.
Should be. Hope it happens and quickly
Or hired by those same agents of authority.
Only in trouble if they didn’t loop them in on the audio feeds.
Waiting for the “No idea how this happened, we’re sorry and promise to make this better in future versions” moment - instead of admitting that this is just part of their business model.
Hoping for prosecution from the EU and at least one other country.
I’m hoping not only prosecution, but an actual outcome such that they (and other companies) are afraid to try this again.
If all they get is a small fine that’s just a business expense to them, then of course they’ll continue doing sh** like this.
from the EU and at least one other country.
EU is not a country.
Current Commission is pushing for chatcontrol so they’d probably applaud LG’s practices.
LOL
I knew someone would point that out.
“other” in this case is shorthand for “not in EU”.
The EU is not a country, yet it does stuff that otherwise countries do, like legislating and judicating privacy laws. The correct term would have been “other political entity” but what is the point of that word picking again?
Like any political entity the EU can do many things at once, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Different institutions also have different interests. The Commission isn’t the primary driver behind chat control, a number of member states are. At the same time EU courts tend to be staunchly opposed to mass surveillance and in the European Parliament it depends on the party.
Current Commission is pushing for chatcontrol so they’d probably applaud LG’s practices.
Just because they want to spy on you doesn’t mean they are okay with other organizations spying on you.
I’ll let the EU prove me wrong.
“We own the glass, we own the TV, we own the living room. We know who is in an LG home.” –LG President of Ads
These are the Gamers Nexus videos btw. Support them and their work. Get some cool shirts and physical media while you’re at it.
What is so dumb is he is banned from running a public company so they get him to run a private company. WTF the oligarchs are really this bad.
My LG TV runs WebOS, which is a linux distro. I have been wondering how hard it is to root and replace with a distro of my own choosing. I had thought because my TV is pretty old that I was safe from the more sophisticated spying, but last week it interrupted what I was watching and would not let me continue using it without agreeing to new terms of use. This revived my interest in rooting it.
I saw this linked the other day. I haven’t looked into it deeply or done it.
I rooted my C1 years ago. I spent weeks afterwards worried that I just destroyed the warranty of a $1,500 TV.
But today, I’ve never felt so justified.
I didn’t know LG webOS rooting was a thing, that’s interesting to know.
There is an open source version of webOS, although I don’t know how it compares to the stock LG version. Maybe there will eventually be something like a LineageOS equivalent.
https://cani.rootmy.tv/ - I just recently bought an LG for the first time, with eyes wide open, and used this site to get root on it, as well as VLANing it with a strict block list, but also an allow list only based policy, and strict no external DNS requests policies.
Also worth knowing that when accepting their policies many of them are optional and are just data slurping consent , think it was the top 2 compulsory in my region out of about 5.
Go look up “tivoization”. GPLv2 isn’t enough to protect you from this shit.
“The toaster is listening” in 2006 🤣
“The toaster is listening” in 2026 😬
Frakking toasters.
It’s 1984 for sure. Every devices listens.
SO SAY WE ALL!
I ran a packet capture on my TV as I left it turned off overnight.
They wake up in the middle of the night, do “stuff” then go back offline. Like a zombie.
I have basically every URL our TV automatically pings blocked at this point. It phones home every 10-30 seconds whether they’re off or on. I think when we get a new TV we’re looking for a dumb TV
we’re looking for a dumb TV
Increasingly hard to find, monitors are going the same way as well as projectors.
Soon enough you’ll need soldering skills.LG’s monitors were downloading malware/ad BS so you can’t trust the monitors either.
LG’s Windows drivers were doing that. LG deserves the blame and can’t be trusted, but ditto for Windows itself.
To be clear this was Windows, detecting you had an LG display device plugged in, and Windows Update opting to automatically download the latest drivers/software for that LG display.
I have my TV on an extension cord and cut the power before going to bed. Hopefully any internal battery it has isn’t enough to do “stuff”.
I have a led backlight connected my TV’s usb port and I’ve noticed it comes on randomly when the TV is turned off, then turns off. This happens couple of times throughout the night, when the TV is clearly doing something
I have a Samsung TV that I suspect does this. Once upon a time (back when I was less knowledgeable about this practice) I connected my TV to the internet. I have since been totally I able to forget my network from the TV, even a factory reset didn’t wipe the network settings from it. I’ve had to block it from the network at a router level.
I only discovered it was still doing this when I got a new router, and I had a popup on my TV saying “software update downloaded and complete” and I was wondering how tf it did that even though I’d gone through the process of forgetting the network, and seemingly the settings showed it had been “done”.
Shady fucks.
Checks out. I wish this was a conspiracy - but they got caught shaking hands w CIA. most people forgot
using US tech - either domestic or foreign; youre being spied by both marketers or governments. sad but true
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cia-hacked-samsung-smart-tvs-wikileaks-vault-7/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/07/cia-targeting-devices-smartphones-pc-tv-wikileaks
The CIA didn’t work with Samsung; they found a vulnerability in Samsung TVs then didn’t tell anyone about it.
Rip out the antenna.
Agreed, but, router block is far less work. 🤣
Right… Because it will only talk to your wireless router.
Genuine question…how else is it going to connect to the internet to upload data?
Read up on Amazon Sidewalk. I’m not saying your TV is using it, but with 5G and mesh networking companies are finding ways to get data back to them without relying on you.
Your neighbor’s open wifi.
Yeah that’s fortunately not a problem for me lol
I just changed my SSIDs.
Ugh. So blocklists were not enough. Time to isolate my telly on the router.
If your television is connected to any network at all its already too late.
Amazon Sidewalk - even if you didn’t connect it, it could still be spying
What is this? I have a Sony TV that’s not connected to the internet so I thought I was safe.
I don’t know if any TVs are actually using it, but Amazon Sidewalk is a form of LoRa, low power, low bandwidth, long distance communication. It’s designed to let non-internet connected devices phone back home. I hear it is very popular with shipping trackers because you can put a small device in a pallet and have it send it’s GPS back for free. I’m not sure it would support the GBs of data TVs are phoning home with each month, but it could certainly send some data home.
Yup, this can get used for very scary stuff. As you said it’s low bandwidth, but since edge devices are more powerful that’s less of a limitation than you might think. A TV could easily do speech to text, rough ACR, and device fingerprinting all locally without any internet connection, then summarize and compress that data for a daily or weekly upload. No need to send the large data itself, just a a small report that’s a few KB in size.
Even then it’s rumoured some brands of TV try to connect to Bluetooth connected devices to connect to the net. I think that was Samsung.
Wouldn’t that require bluetooth tethering?
You could try to host your DNS, change the router DNS to that and then spend a while to see to which addresses the TV talk to and block them, it’s probably time consuming but if you have that time, it can work
Yeah, I know. I have a blocklist for LG and other common brands compiled by someone else on my router DNS adblocker. But considering how sneaky they are with collecting information they should stay the fuck away from, I bet they have mechanisms to get around their common ad domains for the data that matters.
Do a whitelist.
Yeah you are right, you are better of staying away from LG but if you already have one, you could make a subnet for the TV (and/or other IoT devices) with a DNS whitelist to block every domain except Youtube or whatever else is used
I have a separate and isolated net for all my IoT and smart home devices but things like the telly, amp, media player etc need to have some network access. Makes me tired that this kind of fiddling is necessary.
unless LG skips DNS entirely and hard codes its IPs.
Or more likely it’ll just use DoH or DoT. DNS blocking is still effective but it’s becoming less so as these companies wise up.
Oh right that might be a problem, but in that case we can make a subnet (as i suggested on another reply) and block any connection that isn’t on specific addresses or IPs with a firewall
there was a time… long past I suppose …when this would have been an outrage and politicians would be holding press conferences where they took crowbar swings to such devices. Things sure have changed.
So this is why every product started to go standby, low power mode, instead of turning off.
Also because people whine when things take too long to turn on but yes this too
I never had a problem with older TVs’ boot times. In fact, I remember them being faster, the farther back I go…
They’ve been doing that since infrared remotes let you turn the TV on.
