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  • Hacker News
  • If you live in the United States you should find out who your state senator and representative are and write a letter to them asking them to propose, and support legislation prohibiting spying and increasing consumer privacy protection.

    Kentucky passed HB 692 unanimously requiring smart TVs to ask permission if they are going to be spying on us. Ask your state legislature to follow their lead and pass some very popular consumer privacy protection.

    by pastor_williams
  • "LG Says We're Fake News" - Gamers Nexus https://youtu.be/ToP9xfLDSME
    by jasonkhanlar
  • Wow. I hope Gamers Nexus sues for defamation.
    by taylorfinley
  • ACR is "not enabled by default"? Is this actually true or is it one of those weasley technicalities where the tv ships with it turned off, but once you connect the tv to the internet it turns on?
    by seanalltogether
  • Why don’t you read LG’s actual statement, which states that it “requires separate explicit user opt-in consent and can be disabled at any time through the TV settings.”
    by layer8
  • Could just be enabled with a simple update post-unboxing to make it compliant with that statement. Off by default but enabled as soon as it connects.
    by pluc
  • it turns on when you agree to the 197 page arbitration agreement

    source: i made it up

    by functionmouse
  • I bet it's inadvertently enabled if you want to watch Netflix within 5 minutes of powering on the TV and rush through its setup
    by dietr1ch
  • https://youtu.be/6IFVTcM28KA?t=1370

    They at least use a pattern where you need to accept terms of use & privacy policy when you download an app. Same screen has option to accept other agreements like ACR. However by default "select all" option is highlighted so people will often click that.

    Slightly earlier on video they state that certain ad related things got turned on automatically during software updates.

    by buzer
  • Technically when you turn the TV on for the first time, ACR is not enabled. Ergo, not enabled by default.

    Sure, to use the TV you need to go past the EULA screen. And the button right in front of you, pre-selected - is agree to all terms. And after pressing OK, you now have ACR turned on. But you did that, it wasn't on by default.

    Okay I can take my soul sucking corporate hat off now.

    by ZoneZealot
  • Gamers Nexus responded to LGs claims here:

    https://youtu.be/ToP9xfLDSME

    by giancarlostoro
  • Remember that one time when music CDs from Sony MBG installed a rootkit on your PC that continuously sent whatever MP3s you had on your PC back to them?
    by mordae
  • First time hearing of this
    by oceansky
  • I was alive for that but had forgotten about it…wild.
    by SaucyWrong
  • Yep and they were fined a paltry 6 million dollars or so. For actively distributing and infecting users with malware. This on annual sales exceeding $3B.

    That case sure put Mark Russinovich on everyone’s radars, at least.

    Good times.

    by stackghost
  • Remember that time when NSA director James Clapper reassured us they're not the baddies.

    "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

    "No, sir."

    by pampas
  • Remember when Amazon deleted books from customers' Kindles (eBook reader), and the book they decided to remotely burn was .. 1984 from Orwell.
    by stephbook
  • "We own the glass" that's what really stood out to me. I can still disconnect my TV from wifi. But what scares me is when every device comes with their own esim and cellular radio.
    by firefoxd
  • The more disturbing thing to me was the talk about "LG households".
    by mitxela
  • They don't need that - look up Amazon Sidewalk.
    by IshKebab
  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the quote was taken out of context when they were speaking about vertical integration. "We own the glass" was meant to say that they manufacture the panels themselves and not source them from a 3rd party.
    by karolist
  • > But what scares me is when every device comes with their own esim and cellular radio.

    Cars already do, and the solution is well-known: find the bug, and squash it. Yes, your car will still work, and you cannot be denied warranty because of this. The cellular modem is more or less accessible depending on the make and model.

    by drnick1
  • You shouldn't be really scared until all devices follow the pattern of the iPhone (and maybe new flagship Android phones too, I'm not in that camp).

    New iPhones are expensive, more than $1000. Yet most people who get them finance it through their cellular carrier, usually 2 year plans, so it's just $30-$50 tacked on to the monthly cellphone bill. So ... no one cares unless it's going to double their bill.

    Let's say the RAMopocalypse and other AI-driven chip pressues drives everything up even more; let's say now-cheap TVs are now $2000 or $3000. No biggie. Your cellphone company can offer you an eSIM-locked TV with bundled network and services, on a 5 year plan with free lifetime service and replacement, adding just $30-$40 to your bill for 5 years. Maybe it will include something like Family Tracker Life360 Intercom as a value-add - talk to your children to/from the TV to/from any phone on your plan, anywhere, anytime. Safety, etc.

    Same thing with your laptop, home IoT/security devices, etc.

    If ATSC 3.0 dies and gives way to 5g Broadcast, it'll be another enabler for something like this.

    That's when the real lock-in will happen.

    by RiverCrochet
  • When you buy a BIC pen, you own all content created with that pen, not BIC. This needs to be applied to all other tools; computers, TVs, AI agents, ...

    With out the user the content would have never been created. Users are the content creates and now the push to remove their owners ship of their actions and move it to the wealthy.

    Greed begets more greed.

    by yndoendo
  • Same here, I registered the domain [0] moments after watching the GN video. It's serving an oled-safe screensaver with some, uh, relevant content.

    [0] https://weowntheglass.com

    by taylorfinley
  • > "LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as 'Hi LG' is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature."

    > LG went on to say that beyond the aforementioned instances, "the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations."

    LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.

    I think the main questions are:

    1. Is it fully supported to use LG TVs disconnected from the internet.

    2. Are wake word voice controls and ACR truly opt-in. They claim it is in the statement but (as others have mentioned) I remain skeptical what definition of “opt-in” they are using.

    Update: some of this is becoming a semantic discussion on the definitions of “recording” and “collecting”, but to circumvent this I would say:

    If a device can detect words in my ambient conversations and depending on what it detects (accurate or not) it can send that audio to the cloud, I would describe that device as “collecting or recording ambient conversations”

    by bryan0
  • >Hi LG

    Fuck that. Dystopian shit with people yelling brand names in their homes.

    Edit: I forgot people already be yelling Alexa/Siri/Google. I can't imagine a future when you have to yell to each brand in your home. "Hey Sony, turn on the PS7. LG what's on the fridge? Samsung, start the cycle in the dishwasher".

    by aeve890
  • > In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.

    There's a risk here that we will talk-past one another while using different meanings of the same words, so let me offer a scenario:

    AcmeTV has an isolated component which taps microphone input, records to a 5-second ring buffer, and on "Wakey-Wakey" triggers an alert flag. Assume it works perfectly accurately.

    Would you accuse AcmeTV of "recording or collecting ambient conversations" on the basis of that component constantly reading microphone data?

    Personally I wouldn't, because it's not the same kind of "recording" we consumers are concerned about.

    by Terr_
  • I don't know how LG is doing it, but I suspect that they are taking the same approach for wakewords as Alexa does/did. When I worked for Alexa, it was public knowledge that we used relatively inexpensive and low power chips dedicated to wakeword detection, and those would wake up the main chips if they believed that they heard the wakeword. To my understanding, we did this because doing cloud-based wakeword detection was considered incredibly expensive and wasteful, and there are vendors with pretty decent and inexpensive wake word detection chips.

    Then, when the system was more awake, it would attempt to figure out whether the wakeword was real or not (e.g. sometimes certain words and word pairs have a very similar sonic signature to 'Alexa'), and if it felt confident enough then it would begin streaming audio to the back end for significantly improved voice recognition.

    Since Amazon took (and as far as I know still takes) voice privacy incredibly seriously, voice recordings and data were treated as essentially radioactive waste, deleted as soon as legally possible, and secured against even internal Alexa developer access.

    I personally don't have the same level of confidence in security with LG, who seem to think they don't have as much to lose as far as customer trust goes and might as well exploit the heck out of the systems they have. I suspect that problem, which Amazon has so far pretty successfully avoided for the most part, is self-correcting over time.

    by felixgallo
  • Seems like these weasels are using the James Clapper definition of the words “collecting” and “recording”.
    by crmd