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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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
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.
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).
It’s not principally they aren’t tech savy, it s that the politicians are corrupt.
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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?
Your neighbor’s open wifi.
Yeah that’s fortunately not a problem for me lol
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.
I just changed my SSIDs.
Ugh. So blocklists were not enough. Time to isolate my telly on the router.
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.
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
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.
I think the original coverage from Gamers Nexus should also be linked here:
Could you consider removing the
?is=...parameter from the link? That and si are tracking parameters used by YouTube to track who you refer videos to.Thank you for the info 🙏
you did not correctly remove it, you have just hidden it with markdown. probably your client handles it like that when you paste over a link
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.
Bring on the TV firmware. Jailbreak your consoles. Use Linux or steal windows and use tools to completely rip its spyware out of it (e.g. https://revi.cc/).
Custom firmware anywhere and everywhere a device that someone supports with custom firmware is a feature worth researching.
The fucks are only going to jeep doing it. Protect yourself. Push for GDPR like laws in the US. California’s privacy laws are headed in the right direction.
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
They’ve been doing that since infrared remotes let you turn the TV on.
Stuff like this is why I’m still holding on to my old TV for dear life. It’s seen better days but it’s at least easily repairable.
The amp went bad which causes the internal speakers to give up after a couple of minutes, so I just run it with a soundbar. Then one of the cats broke the optical port for it, so now it’s taped on lol. The panel still works great, so I think I’ll just replace the main board on it to keep it going for a few more years.
Once something on it finally goes where repairing it becomes unviable, then I’ve no idea where to go from there. I guess I’ll just keep buying used TVs and fix them up.
As people say in these threads everytime, just don’t give your tv Internet access.
Seems smart to avoid LG as well.
It’s still listening and recording. The recent Gamers Nexus video shows that the just store everything locally until they find a way to send it. They’re always scanning the radio for other access points too.
My Visio TV developed a thing where the OSD menus freeze up and the controls unresponsive frequently - it’s not connected to WiFi. Its my opinion that some internal drive is filled up with my watch data that a factory reset cannot fix, and I suspect the lack of disk space is why it’s freezing. I can’t* prove this, but I suspect it to be.
*I might possibly have the skills to, but my time is devoted to other tasks, and I don’t want to deprive my household of the living room TV just because I want to tear it apart.
High risk low reward. the eFlash would almost certainly be wiped in a reset. If you did get to it, it’s not removable. If you unsoldered it, the new one could need a base load on it for it to work. You could probably buy a used board from another TV, but it could well already have issues. Getting the screen off and back on in one piece isn’t trivial.
A friend of mine recapped his 75" Took most of a day, it did fix the tv, but he complained that it was definitely not worth it.
Same with my vizio!
You should make sure the ACR and voice control features are disabled.
go one step further and open it up and unplug the wifi antennas, just to curtail it even further.
Yeah, it’s a fair point. It’s also because newer TVs are generally less repairable as well, but I didn’t get the message across very well.
I do tv repair. They are dead east to repair. Its basically a large laptop. You have a system board, power board, and depending the brand a few other smaller boards that are easy to swap. Getting the parts is not incredibly difficult, but it depend how new, how old, Eric. EBay is key. But, like any tv, of its the screen, it’s trash. Typically costs more to replace that then buy new.
it depend how new, how old, Eric.
Please do not dox your fellow users, Matt.
(I assume a typo for “etc” but I was amused) :D
If you do ever need to replace that tv, look into monitors for kiosks aimed at businesses. High quality, modern screens with no smart features 🥰
You know you can use a new to without connecting it to the internet.
Suggestions for people who only need and want a good screen instead of an ad infested spy station?
Use them as such, why would you give your screen Internet? Attach a Mediacenter of your choice, e.g. Kodi.
Update firmware over USB.
you would think its as simple as that, but i have seen reports of lg automatically connecting to open networks if they are available
theres also the possibility of them adding some cellular transmitter in the future
maybe the only way is the desolder all the wireless antennas…
Faraday laminate around the antenna also.
Can you link these reports? Not that I don’t believe it, but I see many comments claiming this and never including any evidence.
Why? Why would I accept a device in my home that will snoop on me if I use it as intended?
I think the point is they can’t upload anything if they’re not connected. Unfortunately, they’re some of the best OLED TVs right now in terms of the display
I do understand that but I don’t think it’s something we should accept. Next thing these fuckers have their own 5G antenna and connect to mobile with zero config, then what, rip out the antenna or literally wrap it in tinfoil?
I agree. Don’t support what you don’t support. That being said, some people are ok with the trade-offs and that’s entirely up to them
My TV is 15 years old and works fine. Getting the best TV out there is not very meaningful anymore.
Because if you want a screen of a certain size, there are no other reasonable options.
The same reason you might buy a phone that will spy on you and show you ads. You can’t buy a phone that doesn’t do that.
LGs will find nearby wifi that will let them on to phone home. It doesn’t matter if your own network is locked down. And if they’re doing it, it’s likely others are as well.
Ironically LG still makes good screens. Just don’t ever connect their TVs to the network.
Edit: If you must connect it to a network connect it to a different VLAN (Guest network) with no other devices.
It might be best to connect it to a network that just blackholes the traffic so it doesn’t go hunting for some open wifi.
If it’s like a lot of other devices, it will realize that it can’t get to “The Internet” through that network, and might disconnect. It’s possible it will then look for another option, and might see an open network and use it.
Can confirm. My LG C3 has never touched the internet (and never will) and it’s amazing.
However their budget models (under $400) are very uncompetitive.
TCL and Hisense are much better at those, and you can disable Wi-Fi then plug in your own box.
Used commercial displays maybe.
