God damn LG is really flaming all the way down to the ground aren’t they. Greed will make you do crazy shit.
I’m interested in what they are doing with the information more than anything. It’s not unusual for a media device to be using SSDP/UPNP and mDNS, looking for media devices to connect to. Ideally, off by default with a way to enable/disable and not used for advertising.
LG owns an advertising company. Just like Google tracks everything you do on the internet via their analytics and search products and then feeds you targeted ads, LG tracks everything you watch, all the electronics in your house, and any conversations you have nearby, then feeds you ads through their TVs.
Just like google is an advertising company first and everything else second it’s probably a good idea to think of LG as an advertising company that happens to have a consumer electronics company bolted on. Their TVs are nothing but trojan horses these days, designed to spy on everything they can and get ads in front of your face.
all smart tvs do this! they’ve been doing it for a decade at this point! I’ve been saying never to connect your tv to your internet for the past decade because of this stupid shit that’s only coming out now.
never connect your tv to your internet or network. you want to watch netflix? don’t use your tv, use an appletv or nvidia shield device!
Are those devices not doing the exact same thing though? Why wouldn’t they? Sure they probably don’t have cameras and microphones in them but they probably still do ACR
from my knowledge an Apple TV or Nvidia shield haven’t been caught, recording audio (let alone storing said recordings), sending network requests to every device on your home network and recording mac address of those devices, watching what you view on screen, or any of the other terrible things these shitty smart tvs have been caught doing. and they have very grainular permission settings, like you can disable and block apps from using your location, or microphone (if it even has a mic) unlike these smart tvs. if anyone has any differing data or information i would love to see it.
Fuck buying an LG Tv lmao
Its all of them. The only tvs that aren’t doing this are dumb ones. The reason why they’re so cheap is that they are selling data. Its been this way for years.
My dad’s HP laptop started tripping a Honeypot on my network, now I gotta worry about LG as well…
I need to learn how to do this
Have you heard about ubiquiti yet?
Dang I’ve had a LG TV for years. I must be an idiot.
Don’t worry, they all do it. You basically have to buy a dumb display if you want privacy.
It makes me wonder why we’ve been seeing so much about LG, is Samsung or Sony pushing these stories?
Nah, it’s mostly because gamers Nexus reviewed an LG monitor, which also had that shit (monitors were traditionally ‘dumb’ before this), so he decided to do a broader investigation.
I wonder if I could desolder the WiFi chip
If they don’t already, they will probably make doing that a kill switch trigger. 🫠
How long until smart TV manufacturers partner with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to collect your data even when you don’t give them a connection?
I’m sure they are already on the market
I get why people might want to connect þeir TV to þeir LAN. Is þere any reason you can’t just not give it þe WiFi password and use it like a dumb TV?
it may go around your choice to not configure a network and connect to an open wifi or one in a shared network that some providers run via secondary ssid on their CPE
I’m not sure I care as much if it’s using a neighbor’s unsecured WiFi. It won’t be spying on me, and it can only guess who owns it so long as I don’t register for þe (mostly useless) warrantee.
I had a smart LG dishwasher which I never connected. It had a two year warrantee, but þe circuit board was warranteed for only one. When it failed at 14 m/o, it was of course þe circuit board.
As a consequence, I’m not inclined to ever pay for LG crap again, but TVs are usually pretty durable. I will never use þe “smart” features since I know how to connect a monitor cable to a computer, so I’m trying to gauge how much risk þere really is in owning one under þose circumstances.
The collection of any ID’s from other gear you happen to have on you; such as your bluetooth MAC from your phone or headphones. That gets stored along with the text.
If that is then sent via an unsecured link, your conversations, along with any ID info is sucked into their system to be analysed.
Ok, þat’s a really good point. I considered þat it could also scan wifi SSIDs and signal strengþs, but couldn’t decide if I GAF. Þat and Bluetooth togeþer is certainly worrying.
What unsecured link? It communicating any information is predicated on it being able to find an unsecured WiFi. Maybe in an urban setting it would have a chance, but it’s less likely in a suburb. Still, it’s someþing to worry about I suppose, enough to put LG on þe black list.
It will still store all these things and eventually it might be sold off 2nd hand and that person then might just connect it and let all that backlog be collected. Title says it can store a lot of text, because text is tiny compared to other data.
I really need to finish setting up an isolated network. The problem is I at least want to be able to cast to it.
That’s my thought on TVs that support casting (so it is probably a smart tv).
I have an old chromecast connected to my parents’ normal tv to avoid smart tvs and possible shenanigans
They used to have good TVs :( It’s a good thing I stay away from Smart TVs in general.
Exactly, I’m very disappointed. I bought and LG OLED in 2019, loved it for the image quality and smooth UI. It’s time for an upgrade soon, and I was thinking LG, but will probably have to go diff direction.
I’m holding onto the last of the good plasma tvs from Panasonic, Circa 2012. it’s a fantastic picture and no crap. Rs232 serial control for home assistant to turn it on and off.
I’m dreading the day it dies and I have to find the least shitty replacement
I’ve got the same one. It is awesome. I will pay for someone to repair it if it breaks. 720p of course but all my stuff is DVD so who cares.
I found it to be a struggle to find a non-smart TV that was decent…
Aren’t all TVs non-smart if you do not connect it to the internet?
No they will still collect data that they can
But if they don’t ever get access to the internet, they can collect all the data they want? Unless they connect to nearby unsecured wifi and use that to connect to their server.
There were unsubstantiated rumours that:
- Samsung was connecting to open wifi
- Amazon’s wifi sharing was for this
- 5G was for this and these companies would add SIMs to the TVs.
None of those have been observed or proven though.
In the cases of the LG tvs, they will connect themselves to any open wifi in range, including the Xfinity/AT&T public wifi spots that are often enabled on people’s rented routers.
So if your neighbor, or the Starbuck’s on the corner has open wifi then that’s enough for your TV to send all your data to the mothership.
And just to reiterate, “all your data” includes transcripts of everything you’ve said in vicinity of said TV.
On that note, does anybody know a good set top box with DolbyVision support that doesn’t require Amazon or Google services?
Because the only one that comes to my mind would be an AppleTV and I don’t want to believe that’s the least terrible option…the older my Shield gets, the more I end up looking at the apple TV as the least worst of the bunch. until some foss Linux approach gets easy enough for me to be satisfied it won’t drive the rest of the household mad, that is
Yup. I went Apple TV for our main TV. Apple TV is easy for rest of the household and isn’t a huge Trojan horse. Retired the shield to the upstairs bedroom.
it’s a trojan horse for Apple though right? Apple still collects tons of telemetry they’ve just never been caught selling it
True. But also, a Linux box at the TV just isn’t practical when you live with normal non technical people. Pick your poison unfortunately. I will say it is behind a pi-hole.
Fair enough. I also recommend Apple when Linux isn’t an option
Honestly, I’m surprised this isn’t common behaviour with all Smart TVs these days. It is trivial to probe a LAN network.
It is common behavior for a lot of consumer IoT devices. If it goes on your network and you don’t control the software, you should consider it compromised. Even if the manufacturer isn’t doing outright malicious stuff, it likely isn’t secured very well (they never are) so there’s every chance that someone else could find it and use it as a platform for malicious activity.
It’s weird that this is the takeaway from that investigation that big media is pushing.
This is maliciously burying the headline that LG TVS ARE TRANSCRIBING EVERY WORD THEY HEAR IN YOUR HOUSE AND THEY’RE UPLOADING A TEXT LOG OF IT.
Fucking hell we have two of these at home.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/09/07/disconnect-your-lg-television-from-the-internet-now
Depending on the TOS details, that may very well be a legit crime. Even in 1-party consent states this wouldn’t slide because LG isn’t a participant in the conversations it’s recording, and not everyone talking near a TV has agreed to the TOS.
And even with generous TOS, there’s gonna be legal issues. HIPAA, for instance, could really fuck them if the TVs are in a medical facility and are recording and transmitting private medical data without consent of the patients.
It is undeniably a crime. But in Glorious Free Republican America large corporations are exempt from the law.
I ran Wireshark to capture traffic from my LG C5 and the only “scanning” it did was SSDP. Did they post any written article with further information on what it’s doing? Most if not all of what was detailed in the video can be opted out of;
https://www.pocket-lint.com/i-stopped-my-lg-tv-from-spying-on-me-by-adjusting-these-settings/
Why should we have to opt out of our devices spying on our LAN?
Of course youre right, but we have to opt out of tracking at every level today. Thats the way we collectively allowed the goalpost to be moved.
Now, do they respect the opt out? Thats the real question
You shouldn’t have to opt-out of any of this, but if you own one and want to keep using it, I thought this would be helpful information.
https://thecybersecguru.com/news/lg-smart-tv-spying-investigation/
There are roughly 216 million LG smart TVs in homes, hospitals, offices, and hotels worldwide. Each one maps its local network, fingerprints its content, and logs audio, on or off, whether you’re talking to it or to someone else, whether you’re online or not, and feeds that into an ad engine that sells access to your living room.
They do a lot more than just scan the network.
Gamer Nexus, who uncovered this, has a 2 hour episode about it https://youtu.be/Q9uefFYe6bM
