The company claims reports about its capturing and uploading audio are misleading.

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.

  • furry toaster@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    132·
    6 天前

    “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?

    • Dettweiler@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      10·
      6 天前

      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.

  • lechekaflan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    7 天前

    North Korea must be having a field day talking about what it sees as Southern chaebol capitalism hypocrisy.

    • Jiral@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 天前

      Darn, they are better at mass surveillance than we are. Damn oligarchic capitalism.

  • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    6 天前

    I have an LG tv and I use the Prime streaming app. I recently started working out after about a year of not. Never googled anything or told anyone or anything, just said out loud to myself to get out my floor mat for pushups and whatnot, and not just use my rug. The very next day, I’m suddenly getting Kachava ads on Prime again, which is a healthy liquid meal thing.

  • Rennmaus@feddit.orgEnglish
    41·
    7 天前

    Are there any affordable TVs with 4K with good features without spying with Nexflix & Disney Apps?

    • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      6 天前

      Most of the things I’ve seen basically say ‘no’.

      There are commercial displays that don’t have spyware / connectivity, but they tend to have significantly lower refresh rates / HDR / etc. even if they are 4k. And they’re several times the price of consumer TVs, at least in part because they aren’t being subsidized by selling them at a loss to make money on ads.

      • zeb420@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 天前

        Unfortunately, it’s either this or get a smart TV and never connect it to the internet and use a streaming device or computer. However with the computer option, some platforms like Netflix won’t let you stream 4K without meeting their strict requirements.

        Or just become a pirate and never deal with streaming services again.

    • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      7 天前

      No. Everything is spying. Look at what Gamers Nexus said LG makes more money selling data then selling TVs.

  • Krudler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    6 天前

    Will these TVs throw an error if the Wi-Fi chip ihas been physically removed?

    I’m taking apart a thousand tvs, but never bothered fooling around with the Wi-Fi boards… Never felt I had a reason until these days.

  • ScarlettStunningSpace@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    31·
    7 天前

    I bought one of their monitors a few years ago. Regretted that purchase on day one. It had a stuck magenta pixel that never went away. I should’ve returned it but I would’ve had to drive all the way back to microcenter. Now it’s affected by shit like this. The future is dumb.

  • DigDoug@lemmy.worldEnglish
    258·
    8 天前

    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.

    • DupaCycki@lemmy.worldEnglish
      50·
      8 天前

      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.

      • pdxfed@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        8 天前

        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.

  • Muffi@programming.devEnglish
    135·
    8 天前

    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!

  • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
    861·
    8 天前

    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.

    • ShredderFeeder@shredderfood.netEnglish
      331·
      8 天前

      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.

      • kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        191·
        8 天前

        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

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        12·
        8 天前

        I probably have to look at corporate monitors because those should include no bloatware (or spyware) because they arent subsidized by ads (hopefully)

        • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          8 天前

          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).

          • zpiritual@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            6 天前

            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.

          • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            8·
            7 天前

            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.

            • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              6·
              8 天前

              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.

      • dogslayeggs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        7 天前

        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.

    • Sir. Haxalot@nord.pubEnglish
      22·
      8 天前

      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.