⚡️🚨 ICYMI - Researchers spent 500 hours and $70,000 and found LG TVs logging plain text transcripts in standby, mapping every device in the house, and feeding it to LG's ad arm
Unplug the internet and it saves the files until you plug back in.
LG says its TVs don't record ambient conversations.
The evidence begs to differ.
216 million of these are sitting in living rooms.
Where are the regulators?
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Replies (20)
That's the wrong question. Where are the consumers who will pay for credibly privacy preserving goods and services?
You're retarded, the logging isn't news. TVs logging us became public knowledge back in the Snowden leaks. The news here is that these TVs are so unsecure, the researchers are able to hack in and see the logs.
surprised this is not a Chinese TV maker but it's South Korean
I’m here :)
This tracks with the ACR (automatic content recognition) pipeline most smart TVs run by default—Samsung and Vizio got caught doing similar network fingerprinting years back. The "saves until reconnected" behavior is the tell: that's not passive telemetry, that's a deliberate buffer designed to guarantee no gap in the dataset regardless of network state.
This sucks so much, I always suspected "smart" TVs were feds spying, now it's confirmed... 😬
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So glad I never hooked the fucker to a network… acts as a monitor.
Not just LG:
Watch the video, might not matter.
Never hooked it and never intend to do so. I don’t need to update the firmware of my dumb TV. If it records, it will never find a way to send it. It cannot know what devices are hooked to my network because it does not see it.
Still… want to sell it and get something else. But I suspect most other manufacturer run similar data gathering schemes to feed their add services.
Chinese ones all do it too. I fucking hate smart TVs with a passion.
Is there a way to help yourself and disable the ad tech and privacy intruding functions of these devices?
Keep IoT things in a special VLan for IoT things!
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Regulators? Lmao
TVs should merely be used as a display device for an open source Linux box running your flavour....well that's what I discovered
hey John. Keep going back to where we met. I will miss AB not being there in November
No AB this year? Any reason why?
i heard the key sponsor pulled out by this summer. Max & Stacy's Historico is having a encore that week
That's a bummer, it was my favorite conference.
They showed that in this case “your” TV simply tries to get into your neighborhood networks or also public hotspots if available. Once online all collected data will be sent immediately.