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.
This is a felony in most 2 party consent states.
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.
accountablity? none. consequences? none (maybe a slap on the wrist at most).
Every day I’m grateful I bought a screen and not a “smart” TV
I think the original coverage from Gamers Nexus should also be linked here:
Life’s gulag.
This is a good time to remind everyone to:
- Install Pi Hole, get LG rules to nerf all the telemetric data going out
- Jailbreak the TV, install SmartTube for your YouTube account without ads and live your best life
- Edit: since some people asked for a Pi Hole configuration, I found a couple of them that I’m going to try out and tweak:
I hope it helps!
I mean I know it’s about LG but they are all doing this.
“The toaster is listening” in 2006 🤣
“The toaster is listening” in 2026 😬
It’s 1984 for sure. Every devices listens.
Frakking toasters.
SO SAY WE ALL!
“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.
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.
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.
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:
-
The cookiesgate. Your data is still going around everywhere. You just have a pop up everywhere that means nothing.
-
¿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…
-
If anyone does, EU will be the first.
In most cases, its in a small enclosure or just screwed in. Its exactly like a NVME SSD, if youve built a computer before
this is precisely why i never “pair” the voice remote that came with my vizio. just keep using the dumb one from a previous model
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
Being deliberately ignorant should not be a defense. Just like it isn’t for the peasants.
you can’t prove they did.
I mean, depending on the scale you probably can with investigation.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
Or hired by those same agents of authority.
Should be. Hope it happens and quickly
Only in trouble if they didn’t loop them in on the audio feeds.
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.
