> ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV.
So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification.
We're going to have to get saavy in pulling apart the distinction between "I look at everything and then send a nice summary back to my manufacturer" and "I send everything back to my manufacturer". As AI gets cheaper and more efficient, it'll be baked into everything, and will distill signal at the edge and send the good bits back to central command. I fear the legalese in the ToS will obscure this new way of "not collecting" user information.
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
It's probably easier to do and every bit as accurate as just using a screenshot.
And it's still exactly what I don't want them doing. There's literally zero reason for LG to be building an advertising profile on me because I was foolish enough to buy one of their TVs. This isn't something that makes their products better, it's spying.
Audio is a bit easier to turn into a fingerprint for identification vs video. Video has a lot of smaller subtle changes that happen from things like compression which make it a lot harder to identify. It's why youtube still hasn't figured out piracy, but they'll knock you immediately if you play 5 seconds of copyrighted music.
To me, it's not even about why they're doing it (building an advertising profile). I don't want them doing it at all, for any reason.
When I buy something from the store, my relationship is between me and the store, for the 30 seconds it takes for me to pay for it. I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer. I don't want to be tethered in any way to the manufacturer. I don't want to have an account with the manufacturer. I don't want the device sending anything to the manufacturer, advertising related, telemetry, or even a single bit "user has used your product." Do you get it, manufacturers?? I don't want any kind of relationship with you! I want to purchase my product and use it by myself not with you.
wouldn't taking screenshots in fact not always be possible depending on the content you are watching? For example netflix with their hardware level drm? (Although its their TV they possibly have ways around that with some custom hardware)
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
Wrong. They claim it doesn't record video. Recording means saving permanently - live processing is not recording. ACR is processing the video output live.
Notice what they don't say at all. ACR is just one type of spying. A completely separate feature records what you say from the microphone. They only claimed ACR doesn't do that, which we knew. They did not claim the TV doesn't do that.
This is a carefully crafted PR statement, to avoid saying any lies while making it sound like the accusation was wrong, but it does not actually say the accusation was wrong. We can infer that the likely reason it doesn't say the accusation was wrong is that the accusation is right. Instead, it says several other things, which sound like they are refuting the accusation but are actually refuting other things that nobody said.
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
It apparently is.
Do you know the Nielsen Ratings? That's exactly how they know what people are watching these days. I've been contacted by them to be one of their subjects. They ship you a device that listens and recognizes based on content. They look for certain "fingerprints" in the audio and match against that - it's not capable of recording our conversations, etc (or so they claimed).
It is pretty neat and several resources online explaining it but it chunks the recoding and does a hash of the fft of each frame i think which reduces the data a lot. The server has a pre hashed database https://hackernoon.com/how-shazam-works-in-a-nutshell
TV shows are completed and in the can well before air date. It is entirely plausible that the interested party in having the content identifiable by Shazam like services submit whatever needs to be submitted for new content
Regardless of it being how it always was done, such a finger print can easily be injected into LG's advertising ecosystem to infer everything about your demographic and what your interests and income might be and hit you with more specialized ads.
What we watch is not OK to be fed ads, especially if I wasn't using their service to being with and its monitoring the audio from any input to do this.
In this way, smart tvs and smart home devices are effectively hostile devices behind your router at home.
Yes. It’s also horrible that they have microphones in your home listening to your conversations. LG knowing what I’m watching is awful, but it seems even worse for LG to listen in to the conversation I have with my loved ones about it after. I don’t want to be under surveillance in my own home.
As far as I know, watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization. Nielsen researched and developed ACR technology but it never required watermarks.
When Nielsen first started collecting data (1950s), they handed out diaries to a group of around 5 000 selected households. Nielsen would then collect these diaries and extrapolate viewing patterns across the entire population.
After that came phone surveys. Next step (1980s) was the "people meter", a small box attached to the TV that could automatically detect which channel was tuned and which household members were in the room.
In the 1990s the set-top box made all of that redundant as the cable and satellite providers could directly see which channel every single box was tuned to at all times.
Broadcasters: the cutting edge of streaming information is ours! Now let's make it so everyone unknowingly broadcasts as much info back to us as possible!
nielsen's ACR method is embedded into millions of devices and vendors. No need for a microphone, it's processing the audio signal being sent out. A microphone would be a wasted conversion..
(your car infotainment also likely has nielsen tech in it most likely, as they bought arbitron and gracenote)
Nielsen is global Company that is used for pricing ads on TV stations around the world. Their way of doing it from what I know personally is that they sign up people to put this ACR boxes voluntarily and then based on extrapolation of data - they can tell you pretty close what was the viewership across demographics. Similar to how election polls are done - you just need a good sample.
Does it matter? Whether they are doing it on device or in the cloud, they are still recording what their customers say and collecting data on it without their consent.
In what way? Dramatically lower processing and signature complexity. Audio signature matching is trivial and extremely well known. I see absolutely nothing implausible about this, and it seems a robust, viable solution.
> This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification.
That paper found no such thing. That paper actually demonstrated that they have no clue how the ACR happened, they just demonstrated that playing content yielded content IDs. It is more likely they were witnessing audio ACR happening, exactly as LG described.
"Everything" would include the microphone, both in the remote and the TV. They're claiming to split off the audio, with one path going to the speakers (and there to your ears), and the other path being hashed (and from there to LG).
They still claim to get your media's audio, but deny using the microphones.
If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? It says the TV owner is "solely responsible" for obtaining all necessary consents from third parties whose voices may be recorded by the device, and must warn household members and guests that their voices may be recorded, and if someone does not agree, the TV's microphone and voice functions need to be turned off. [0]
> If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV?
1. The introduction says that Smart TVs are not included in this ToS ("not including Smart TVs").
2. Where do the terms say anything about "sensitive" content? The closest thing I see is section 4.d, but that's just about wiretapping/privacy laws in general.
They explicitly state that the audio ACR is done through the "TV’s internal audio processor". e.g. rendered audio, not recorded audio. I mean, you could stretch the claim to have it internal include recorded audio, but that seems dubious.
Because when people cry wolf, and then there is no wolf, it actually harms the consumer by lowering everyone's guard. Have people not learned this yet?
Gamers Nexus discovered recently, through their "AMD blacklisting" bit (when some relatively minor mid-lifecycle refresh of a product they didn't get a demo unit, so it turned into some "we are the truthsayers!" bit), that doing the Louis Rossmann routine earns them loads of links and clicks. So they're firmly in the cry wolf territory now, and it makes me more dubious of their claims that the people they are questioning.
This whole space is filled with bullshit now. Saw another video where a big channel talks about why TVs are so cheap now, and they then explain it that it's because they sell your data. In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
I agree with you that accusations need to be backed by proofs and the kneejerk reactions on HN are embarrassing to read and unhelpful. Big bad evil corp, every single time. I mean those reactions are all over social media, but I just expected a little bit less knee jerk from HN.
> In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
Unfortunately that part if your comment is provably false in at least one instance: Vizio. It's a shame, I thought we were on the same page about spreading half truths.
Vizio's numbers are famously public due to its recent sale. We know they lost money on most televisions sold (not all!), and they made it up in ad revenue and content distribution from those TVs. It doesn't prove that LG loses money on its TVs, but it's clearly not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
After doing some investigation into my Bang Olufsen after some tech not working right apparently Dev mode on it allows "Most probable raw grab: ThinQ/SSAP on the LAN after pairing — ~960×540 JPEG. Live Plus/ACR: most probably sends a fingerprint, not a retrievable raw frame."
> Features such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional. These features are not enabled by default. Users can choose to enable these features and can manage or withdraw consent through TV settings.
They may be optional features but I’m pretty sure when I set up my tv and got to the screen where you are required to agree to the various terms and privacy legalese the “happy path” was to hit the “accept all” button vs use the remote to navigate into each one, read, and only activate the few required to use the tv. I would not call this dark pattern “optional” by default.
Even some updates will trigger the acceptance screen from time to time, with a second scare confirmation shown when I reject. If my wife or kids were shown that screen when I’m not around they would accept it.
Note that their statement could also be true if they record 99% of the time. We need to start calling companies out for meaningless weasel statements like "We don't record continuously".
The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record. Putting a remote control listening hardware on a device that runs a plethora of 3rd party apps and with full connection to the internet means that even if LG isn't controlling that mic, someone else will be.
There are lots of good reasons that are used to paper over the abuse cases.
Microphones in tvs are a useful accessibility feature when they enable voice commands for the user, and allow them to be used as voice assistants.
They also enable tvs with a camera and microphone to be used as video calling or audio calling interfaces. Used well we get star Trek view screens, used poorly we get little brother monitoring.
For those interested, it turns the tv into an interactive terminal for voice and camera powered video games, which are becoming more popular.
Unfortunately advertising and tracking incentives drive the abuse cases to the top and will crush the positive use cases :(
You'd be looking for what's now called a "dumb tv". But those are getting rare, because TVs that can't sell your watch data have to be more expensive to make up for that, and that doesn't sell. Commercial screens are an option, as are computer monitors. Or getting a smart tv and never connecting it to the internet. So far nobody has started shipping TVs with a mobile connection to exfiltrate data, as far as we know. Unlike cars.
There's no practical reason for most people. Spying is the primary function. Edge cases like accessibility or conferencing can be easily enabled with an add on USB mic. You'd need a USB webcam with mic for conferencing anyway.
Voice recognition is really useful when searching. It's annoying to type with a TV remote. Also you can just say what you want like "play breaking bad on Netflix" and it'll just do it.
Edit: also the mic in the remote has a function to calibrate the speakers to the room (correcting for the impulse response of the room basically) which can make the audio much better.
Many common SOC's MediaTek, Realtek, and Broadcom SOC's quite often used modern audio capable devices analog pins can be software defined either input or output.
IIRC I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room. Audio quality wasn't perfect, but it making sense what was spoken was good enough.
> The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record.
Exactly, and recent announcements like Apple normalising always on recording, even wrapped in “big promises” on privacy, deserve a lot more attention and strong regulation.
They say these features are opt-in and they reject dark patterns, but in my experience setting up LG TVs, everything was opt-in and I had to manually hunt through all the menus to turn this stuff off.
Their statements don’t align with the reality I’ve experienced as a customer. My TV is not connected to the network, because the setup process left me with 0 trust that LG wouldn’t be collecting information regardless of my settings, or that I didn’t miss something. There was also the risk that they’d add a new “feature” with an update which would I’d be automatically opted in to.
Until they start selling truly dumb TVs, I’m not going to trust anything and their statements fall flat.
I probably should have said "everything was already enabled"... Opt-in/out was on the mind, and neither seemed like the right wording to convey that the choice was already made for me in the wrong direction.... I was opted in automatically.
If the checkbox is already ticked it is called opt-out. You have to toggle the checkbox to not be activated. The other way around is opt-in. The checkbox is empty and if you want to enable it you have to take action.
I would argue there is a very clear unambiguously correct choice of wording for that case. The setting was opt out. It's a binary concept and which case it's in is determined by the default given no user action. If it is opt in, then it is off by default and you have to make the choice to turn it on. If it is opt out, it is on by default and you have to make the choice to turn it off. If it was enabled automatically it is opt out. There's no need to complicate the meaning of terminology with a straightforward definition. Given you don't take active action, that you accept all defaults and take the path of least resistance, is it enabled or disabled by default? That's all that matters.
It was enabled when you accepted the terms and conditions when you first turned it on, or did a firmware update. LGs statment says this:
> ACR is an optional feature that is turned off by default. To enable ACR, a user must accept LG’s Viewing Information Agreement, which describes how ACR works.
Which I take to mean that when you agree to the terms, it enables the feature.
Based on the section on gamersnexus, they use dark patterns to get you to agree. They show a bunch of user agreements to you all at once and auto select the “accept all” button to get your tv working. They hide the optional agreements for spying amongst all the other ones you need to agree to to make the tv work. Most people probably don’t realise you can turn off the checkbox which gives permission to have your tv spy on you.
If the user needs to accept the viewing agreement to get through the initial setup, and agreement enables those features, then it's an opt-out feature, not an opt-in feature.
The only alternative would be to not accept the agreement and return the TV to the store, because there would be no way to go through the setup and actually use the TV.
I can't remember if this agreement was forced during the last setup I did, but most of these agreements are forced. There is no way to not check a box and still use the device with the desired featured turned off out of the gate.
Maybe they technically have it opt-out, but from a user perspective, that's not the experience. This is a dark pattern and their framing around this solidifies that I will never buy another LG product.
At 5:58 of the Gamers Nexus (GN) video about LG TV's spying, GN make a statement:
Now, our lawyers have made the totally unrelated point uh that we cannot legally agree to contracts such as terms of service or conditions while incredibly innebriated.
So they drank a lot of margaritas while video-recording the section concerning reading and accepting the Terms of Service for the TV.
Yesterday I saw a comment that say that some info collecting was "opt-in by default" and I imagined it was an evil conspiracy f corporations to dilute the name. I just looked for the comment, but it was just another case of error while writing the comment.
Anyway, last year my phone died and I bought a new one made by Samsung. I had to opt out of collection like 4 or 5 times with confusing buttons, and there is a lot of crapware installed by default, and then the phone offered to install two additional apps. I almost sure I said no, but one of them got installed anyway.
For like a decade, the "opt-in" to ACR was included in the ToS agreement needed to use any smart features. Then at least some brands made the opt-in separate, but made it look like a recommendation engine or "help us improve your experience" agreement.
LG adopted the "Maybe Later" dark pattern for opt-in to ACR, at least in some markets. Though I guess you never know for sure with A/B testing.
> "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”
LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
I don't know how LG TVs do it, but e.g. many smartphones use a dedicated ASIC/audio processing chip that does not really record anything, but specifically listens for the wake word and discards all other audio to save power/battery life. I think this distinction is relevant, because there is a huge privacy difference between streaming a live audio stream to the cloud to detect a wake word and a specialized audio processor that has a small buffer only for detecting the wake word, where the audio does not leave that processor.
Theoretically, you could call that few-second buffer recording, but I don't think that would be collecting/recording ambient conversations to most people, since it's ephemeral and does not leave your device.
The question, of course, is what happens in LG TVs.
Fair points, but 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”
I think that was only done back when the processing power needed was relatively high, or for power constrained devices. I'd be really surprised if they do that for a smart TV.
>LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
No, it's arguably accurate because "record" implies it's being persisted. Otherwise something as simple as a sound meter (which needs a microphone to operate) is "recording".
> 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.
Human wake word recognition isn't infallible, either. How often in your life did you respond because you thought somebody called your name and it wasn't actually the case?
Later, AcmeTV has a 1MB lookup table of wake words that can be updated OTA. Whenever a wake word is detected, it triggers an alert flag with the device id, word id, and timestamp, and then broadcasts it out as high-frequency sound through the speakers.
Nearby, another AcmeTV or business partner device picks up the sound and sends it to AcmeHQ.
The former device "never transmits your viewing behavior to Acme".
The latter device "never records your viewing behavior".
I endorse the cynicism, but I feel that's moving the goalposts a tad, from "good is impossible" to "good is improbable".
Or, in a heavily-paraphrased nutshell:
Politician: "Watch-words are ALWAYS evil-mode. They have to be lying."
Terr: "No. Here's a watch-word which would be good-mode."
Politician: "Well, it'll still *become* evil-mode, eventually."
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".
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.
Look I know it's easy to believe these things when your paycheck depends upon it, god knows I've convinced myself of a convenient fact or two when it was necessary for me to get through the day. But afterwards, without a financial interest, you owe it to yourself to go back and think about it again.
Everyone complains but realistically TVs are so incredibly cheap now, I can't believe anyone would make money from hardware alone. I mean a Samsung 55in 4k tv for $300 delivered for free is crazy, let alone the $179 insignia one.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Its looks like the sort of stuff that happens to a tragic fantasy hero after a Faustian deal. Except they would've asked for riches, love or eternal youth, we on the other hand just want our middling-quality tv to work.
Sure, to use the TV you need to go past the EULA screen.
And that's where the problem is.
TVs should be TVs. Phones should be phones. Cars should be cars. If the manufacturers can't help themselves adding other stuff that is for their own benefit and not the product owner's and some of it so bad that it needs legal weasel words to CTA and competition in the market is insufficient to kill these practices off then it's time for heavy-handed regulation.
Maybe we say you can't sell any product in these categories in our country with any remote connectivity at all except for specifically permitted uses. Maybe the penalty for wilful violation is a warning with a big fine. Maybe the penalty for repeated wilful violation is fines that are an existential threat to the business and personally barring the corporate executives from holding corporate office for the next five years. That kind of thing.
On LG TVs there are about 5 separate agreements you need to accept. You dont need to accept them all to use the tv, but in the initial setup LG puts a handy 'Accept All' button front and center, which agrees to all 5 incrluding the unnecessary ones and turns on the ACR feature. This is the dark pattern most people are pissed about.
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.
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.”
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?
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.
As the saying goes, this is what radicalized me. If any one of us did anything close to this we would be treated like Aaron Swartz and given a 35+ year prison sentence.
But in the Sony case the DOJ didn't even threaten criminal charges.
A quixotic legal dream: All consumer data-surveillance must take the form of an opt-in monthly payment plan, which either side can cancel.
So the TV gets advertised as "$$$, but basically $$ if you sign up to be surveilled and get a $/month check back." If the company sets $/month too low--or is too creepy about what they collect--people just won't opt-in.
But what happens if they promise big pay-backs but routinely cancel from their side? That's a problem, but at least it's a kind "the market" can handle when it comes to reputation and bad reviews.
> "LG also said that its features like “Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional,” and “not enabled by default.”
I am absolutely certain that ACR was enabled on our new TV by default, back some years ago. I am nearly certain their voice recognition, and advertising spying were enabled on our TV by default.
If none of this is truly "enabled by default" then this is a recent development.
I discovered this many years ago and did some deep dives, and unfortunately didn't publish anything about it. Lesson learned.
A few months ago, my Roku TV started displaying these weird popups, saying something like, "Looks like you're watching college basketball. Did you know Roku-TV also has college basketball?" - something like that. Well, for the Roku device, yes, there was a setting I could disable, but (1) Roku pushed this 'feature' and made it default without my knowledge/consent, and (2) the config setting says the popups will stop, but it doesn't mention the data collection; my assumption is they're still collecting that data for their own data analytics purposes.
Pretty much the exact reason I stopped using Roku. I bought a streaming device to stream, but apparently roku decided selling devices wasn't lucrative enough so they started selling ads instead.
I really wish there was a better way to do a media center linux.
For practical fixes, consider replacing the TV with a “commercial monitor” and connecting an Apple TV device instead (or an open source thingy).
Disconnecting “smart tv” from internet to use Apple TV is possible and might work, but you will get nagged to reconnect all the time. And TV mfr will eventually try to find workarounds - purchase access to wireless connections from large-footprint connectivity providers (Xfinity WIFI, 4g/5g networks, etc) or create a p2p network among their own connected devices. I doubt they do it right now as it’s less profitable to focus on niche audience, but eventually it might become profitable enough.
This document isn't terribly easy to understand by the standards of traditional TV's. You have to pay close attention to figure out what is and isn't going on, and when. It also should have been taped to the front of every LG TV when it comes out of the box.
User Choice:
There is extensive explanation of how what LG TV's are doing isn't nefarious, but the fact remains that there's no switch to turn it off. Why not just put a simple hardware on/off switch on these TV"s to turn off all connectivity? Maybe some users want dumb TV's, or maybe they just don't want to worry about all of this.
Informed Consent:
Buyers apparently consented to this at the store. Now you're finally informing them. That's now how informed consent works.
Continuous Improvement:
I'll believe LG and other Smart TV manufacturers are serious about this when they add a hardware wifi on/off switch, and not a moment before.
Instead, I connect a Google TV Streamer, as I'm in the Google ecosystem. For my friends in the Apple ecosystem, I tell them to do the same with an Apple TV box.
This is the way. My TV tries its hardest to get me to connect and whenever I turn it on, it doesn’t fail to remind me that I’ve disabled the microphone and that I should turn it back on. But as soon as the Apple TV takes over all is good.
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.
I've one question: I've used android phone (realme, which is chinese). And i remember that whenever we used to discuss somethings among our friends, i started used to get ads realated to that on my laptop, phone within atmost a hour.
So, was realme transcribing all conversations and uploading it? Can someone answer?
Wired wrote an article in 2017 [1] on whether it's possible/probable to do that. Technology has evolved a lot since then, so it's a lot more feasible, but the article describes how far metadata alone can go.
For example, let's say an ad network knows your and your friends' location, and knows you've met because you've been close together frequently, or are using the same wifi network. You talk about perfumes, then later one of them looks up perfumes on their phone. Google would usually have access to this much metadata, and will likely serve you perfume ads because of your friend who later looked it up.
This doesn't directly answer your question though. The answer would be - it's possible, but a lot is possible without that.
It's technically possible but very unlikely. Running TTS continuously is a big battery drain and slows down the rest of the phone while you're using it. Google has a live TTS service for hearing impaired which I've run for a while to test it, and even with it practically built into the OS it's sucking up battery like you'd expect it to.
It's more likely that this is all due to external forces. Having your device on the same network, in close enough proximity to detect each other, for instance, combined with one of your friends having Googled the stuff you were talking about.
Or just basic data collection. There's the classic story about how supermarkets know you're pregnant before you do, just based on the groceries you buy (no, not pregnancy tests). Ad networks buy and collect a humongous amount of information about everyone and serve ultra specific targeted ads based on nothing more than pattern matching based on what the rest of humanity is doing.
It's impossible to rule out that the thing did run a 24/7 TTS service, but I think the depressing fact that ad networks don't need to listen to our conversations to know what we're talking about is more probable.
I don't know, but I suspect the battery drain would be substantial. I wonder if there is a different explanation: maybe one of your friends searched for information on the topic while you were on the same hotspot/in the same location and that (along with existing relationship graphs?) allowed them to target you? That's how I'd do it, I think.
There is a real possibility that either something you saw triggered the conversation and/or that you remember the ad because you spoke about it. It’s enough to linger on an ad for the platform to recognize your interest and serve you more ads like it.
You don't need monitoring for that to work. Just something like "Hey, Google". The device knows a bunch of keywords and when it hears them it's bingo. As long as your laptop and phone are logged into the same local network with the same public IP they'll get the same ads.
And your phone most likely already listens all the time to catch an "Hey, Google" (or something similar).
I think the disappointing reality is that those ad networks have enough access to the content of your attention (and therefore what you talk to your friends about) that the technical cost and risk of surreptitious audio monitoring just isn't necessary.
People always dismiss this as FUD but it's been happening to me more than ever. I know in many cases it is more likely that firms are acquiring purchase histories and location data but that doesn't explain other incidents.
For example, last week I was complaining to my spouse about shoulder pain and how I was afraid I may need another surgery. YouTube has suddenly starting flooding my feed with videos about "shoulder exercises to avoid surgery." I hadn't searched any of those terms, purchased anything or visited an orthopedic, so I don't know what else could possibly explain it.
It could have been something as simple as lingering on some kind of content related to physical therapy on a social media feed before scrolling past it, or maybe your wife googled it and it got correlated via network?
If you have one of those TVs, disassemble it and unplug or remove the microphone, camera and the wireless adapter. Use it as a (rather nice) 4K monitor for a Linux box with Plasma in Bigscreen mode. Pair that with an airmouse remote and you get the most private and user-centric streaming/gaming platform that you can build. Put a decent GPU in the box, add an Xbox controller and Steam and you also built the world's best console.
That is one thing AI companies try to do, make it impossible to do any kind of piracy or reverse engineering through their "safety alignments". And it's pretty reliable.
It should be noted that Gamers Nexus discovered LG TVs reach out and build a map of every device in the area.
They noted the discovery traffic with Wireshark, and commented on LG boasting about how many connected devices their networks can see.
This remains to be a larger issue than the clear fact LG TVs can easily be used as remote spy devices, even when offline, by wirelessly remote connected agents.
The only reason TV’s are getting cheaper is the business model changed. Now your viewing data (and perhaps conversations) are part of their product offering.
OLED productions costs have fallen, and the yields have gotten better — displays of all kinds have gotten cheaper, not just TVs; OLEDs have started showing up in products they haven’t before for cost reasons, etc.
The manufacturers make some profit on the data they harvest, sure; but the biggest BOM costs of TVs have definitely also dropped sharply.
It's probably mixed. I think Vizio's financial statements suggest they lose money on TVs and make it up on user data, but I'm not sure this holds for other manufacturers. I agree with you that TVs have gotten much cheaper to make, which probably incentivized the "collect it all" mentality, since their reach has increased and they can target more customers with lower prices.
When they spend 400 on a tv and sell it for 410 and sell the data for 40 it doesn’t mean the data makes 4 times as much as the tv. The cost of gathering that data is still 400, they have nothing to sell without spending 409 in the hardware.
It seems conditions are such that the TV selling business is worthless (i.e. unprofitable) without collecting the data, and the TV data collection business can't work without selling TVs.
I don't need the TV to be cheaper. I can afford to make up the difference for whatever few hundred dollars extra they would earn selling my data. But the expensive ones do this stuff, too.
So what you're saying is you're more valuable to advertisers . . . which means the amount you are worth to them grows with the amount you'd spend to avoid them.
Unless this stuff is made literally illegal they will keep doing it, because it's far more profitable than the alternatives. This is precisely why ideas like paying for a privacy respecting option on Facebook could never work.
I recently solved this problem by buying the Dell U5226KW. It has the same height as a 16:9 42" TV, but is 21:9, so a lot wider. It costs about four times as much as a similar sized 16:9 TV and you can't get it any bigger.
Highly efficient" is 25mW at 33MHz. According to the Wikipedia page, it can run even when the PC is off but plugged in or connected to battery. an ARM Cortex M0-4 will use even less power in idle. All it needs is a tiny capacitor and bootrom and a secret flash storage to record audio and upload it once internet becomes available
"The Intel Management Engine always runs as long as the motherboard is receiving power, even when the computer is turned off. This issue can be mitigated with the deployment of a hardware device which is able to disconnect all connections to mains power as well as all internal forms of energy storage. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some security researchers have voiced concern that the Management Engine is a backdoor.
Intel's main competitor, AMD, has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of its post-2013 CPUs."
People worried about LG. Use Android, iOS and Windows. Use Facebook and TikTok! Use WhatApp and get shocked TikTok keeps all data, video, images, text and reads it. Same as WhatsApp. Drive a Tesla. Have that Ring on the door and other devices.
Go figure. People are strange.
And yes, that ME and PSP are on every cpu since I can't remember, Thinkpad T60 was probably one of the last ones without spy tech.
At what point do we need to contend with an out-of-band mesh network? Sure you didn't connect your TV to your LAN, but did anyone within LoRa range, on any device from the manufacturer?
We do that but use a Kubuntu Linux laptop behind the TV and a wireless mouse and keyboard (when we want to pause a movie in Chrome and search for something, like details about an actor in a movie).
I've gotten frustrated enough with my Apple TV that once my gen of hardware is no longer supported I'll replace it with a Raspberry Pi. I don't need fancy apps, just a browser for Jellyfin and (sometimes) YouTube. Any other incidental streaming service usage can also be done through a browser anyway.
A heads up: my CachyOS gaming PC has been doubling as my media box. But sadly, I've noticed that modern streaming DRM limits the quality because the OS+hardware is not "trusted". There's probably a way to hack around it, but I haven't gotten into it
Exactly this. Search for a mini PC and it'll have a cheap Intel SoC in it that performs way better than a Raspberry Pi 5 but cheaper (comes with everything for ~$300), and even consumes a similar amount of power.
There it is. Not a single TV at my house ever seen a WiFi password. I add cheap Amazon FireStick and be done. Sure Amazon also spies on me but as far as I know original FireStick does not have built-in microphone and probably is not scanning/copying my LAN content to some cloud/back home. And at any time I can just throw it in the trash, get another $29 device. Once I/you plug WiFi password to your TV, there is now way of coming back.
I for one completely believe them. That's why I rooted my C5, disabled all telemetry, and disabled Internet access entirely by default from an isolated vlan on my network that has no access to anything on any other network. I'm tempted to remove the WiFi/BT board if it's an add-on card, and probably unplug the microphones as well. I only need it as a display for my PC and 4K disc player.
The leaked advertising pitch videos from them where they say "we own the glass" as a pitch to potential advertising partners, about a tv they sold me just viscerally pissed me off so I'm kind of just done with them even if thats an irrationally strong response. The whole attitude just makes me so mad.
The US agreement says it too. They make you agree to them collecting it. It says they listen to everything that's said in the vicinity and you agree to inform any guests to your house that they're being recorded at all times. But nobody reads that.
And if anyone didn’t watch GN’s video on it, it’s thousands of pages of text requiring a button press to scroll each. It’s designed for no one to read.
We should have laws that limit this kinda of “agreements”
They should flat out be banned for consumer electronics and goods.
It's insane that something you purchase can force a post purchase EULA before it can do anything.
Imagine buying a shirt but there's a 10 page EULA that says you agree to arbitration as soon as you break the seal. Or a blender, or an oven, or a refrigerator.
A lot of the "smart" electronics are in fact just that, they are sneaking in EULAs to use an app to connect to the device which robs you of your rights and protections as a consumer "Oh, the law says we have to give a 10 year warranty, but unfortunately you installed our app to work with your device which says you agree to forgo the warranty and pay us for the right to sue".
The GDPR does. Consent to data processing must be unambiguous, accessible, informed in plain language with no legal or technical jargon, and not have any preselected boxes.
The problem is the capacity to litigate is far surpassed by the world's speed and volume of doing bad.
This is a case where companies' actions should be treated like parking tickets: a fine is issued summarily, with option to appeal, not a slow process of litigation having to happen before a fine is issued.
Also debunked in the Gamer Nexus video. The TV will scan for public wifis and connect. Watching the video, it also seemed like a "missed opportunity" for LG to not create a mesh network of LG devices that would help eachother connect to the internet. So the LG device on your neighbours wifi might help your not connected TV to some tasty internet access. Or at least to unload its cache of A(V)CR fingerprints.
There are so many misunderstandings about that video. Which ain’t surprising as it was longer than a movie and mainly nonsense about what it can do rather than what it does do.
Agreed. I’ve come to believe that the video’s benefit from bringing awareness to the issue is outweighed by how misleading it is. Massive amounts of the video were “we hacked the TV and made it do [bad thing]” and was reported as “LG TVs do [bad thing]!”
Disclaimer: I haven’t yet watched the video, but on the point of security: yes, when data is collected without my clear approval and full understanding, and is not done in a secure way, it matters all the more.
It’s of little concern to me that the threat is theoretical when it’s only a matter of time before a script kiddy or some bored guy with a YouTube tutorial and $20 of AI credits sets it up himself, let alone well-funded groups or motivated actors.
Unmanaged IOT devices in general are not to be trusted. LG isn’t leading with transparency nor are they big enough like Microsoft or Apple to put out bug bounties and audits with hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on them. They make the device that sits in the corner of your living room and is forgotten about. They’re being cagey about the data they collect and how they collect it, and I’m asked to take the risk on “trust me bro” and “you’re required to tell anyone within earshot of the TV’s mic that they’re being recorded”? Fuck that.
Never mind that data being exposed even if encrypted is a risk all its own: the collection can start now, and whenever it’s detected and blocked it’s too late. It can be cracked later whenever they have the tech and the time.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the television would search for unsecured wi-fi or other ways of connecting to the internet without user input.
I agree, it would be easy for a security research to discover if a TV tried to do that and would result in an even greater stuffstorm than LG is dealing with now or that Samsung dealt with in the past.
It’s absolutely unreasonable. Each subscriber has a certain amount of fixed bandwidth available to them, and there are other devices connected to their network. By connecting an unauthorized device, that device now has both the ability to consume bandwidth to which it’s not entitled, and potentially scan the network for vulnerabilities.
It’s basically stealing.
Would you want some device connecting to your network that is not under your control?
And before you answer “well, you should lock it down,” yes, that’s true, but we do not blame the victim if they fail to do so. An unlocked door is not an invitation.
I'm not sure if any TVs currently do this, but they could connect to unsecured public WiFi without the user doing anything, if one were available with no password. Fortunately such networks aren't that common most places, but it's not a big leap from the sketchy things LG and other companies do. They could also put SIMs in them if they wanted. Again, I don't know that any do that, but I wouldn't put it past them. I'm not that paranoid, but I don't trust them to be up front and ethical.
A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist. Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
I'm not sure of the current state of it, but a few years back specturm was selling access to a private network based on consumer routers. Tmobile could partner with them so that one of their customers could go through spectrum instead of the cell towers in cases where connections were spotty.
That's exactly the sort of thing I could see LG piggy backing on. Your neighbor might have spectrum so the LG TV connects to it's private network to phone home.
Xfinity/Comcast does the same thing. By default, the router they provide has a separate WiFi network supporting their distributed WiFi service. It's only for their customers, and it's not an open no-password network, but I'm certain they would offer it to any company that paid for access. They also have WiFi APs on telephone poles to broaden coverage.
If you live in a dense city, there's a good chance you can reach an open network. When I lived in midtown Manhattan, there were around 500 SSIDs reachable from my apartment.
> A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist.
We use a Kubuntu Linux laptop behind the TV with a wireless mouse and keyboard (for searching and stuff), stream in Chrome, works great. And yes, we trust this combination.
> Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
We don't use Amazon device products just because we use Kubuntu Linux on PC's in our home but yes based on LG's behavior we trust Amazon more and we don't put our LG TV or any of our LG appliances we bought a few years ago, on the Internet.
I have a 10-year-old LG TV that runs webOS 3. The first update slowed it down - not that it was particularly fast to begin with - and every subsequent update made it even slower.
It also constantly nags you to update the firmware. You can’t just refuse once; every time you turn on the TV, it asks you again.
I won’t make the same mistake the next time I go shopping for a TV.
Forgot to mention - there were no improvements whatsoever in terms of functionality.
Agreed. I leave my tv disconnected from the internet, and connect my Apple TV instead… the default UX on most tvs is so much slower and add-riddled than Apple’s
Bold from the verge, as clicking the link to go to the official statement took me through 3 redirect trackers as picked up by my browser/extensions (I think ubo to be specific)
> Audio used for wake-word detection is processed locally on the TV and, if no wake word is detected, audio is not converted to text, stored, or transmitted. Voice-recognition results and related technical logs may be generated as part of processing a voice command. These records are associated with specific voice interactions and do not indicate continuous recording of conversations occurring outside an active voice recognition session.
From their statement. This entire thing is contradictory. You cannot both say "not converted to text, stored, or transmitted", while at the same time saying the results may be generated and stored in the form of logs.
We need to hold companies responsible for this shit.
So very strange every time I visit Tomshardware.com, I get a pop-up on my iPhone that asked me "Do you want to download "sync-pixel" on
"usync.ingage.tech"?
What is that? And why does it only happen on that website?
Leaving TVs disconnected from the internet is the only way to ignore this.
Connect your own devices and smarts to it.
A broader issue is that it does any kind of recording, or processing of the signals around the tv (from a microphone) or what is displayed on the tv (image) is both extremely private.
Privacy has been violated by LG according to their own wording. a way that is not controlled by settings.
What might LG want with an anonymized hash of the audio being played or shown on someone's screen?
Existing ad matching technology can link it with the video of what you're watching to build a shadow profile of you and then sell the attention of your eyeballs to advertising.
From there, simply what you watch, at what time, for how long roughly sets up a wonderful demographic of age, gender, interests, and all that fun stuff. This is an area of tv and video advertisign that has existed for a long time including online and cable tv boxes.
LG's statement that it doesn't move your info anywhere about what is being watched via audio seems to be a variant of this. Using the audio fingerprint, their software could request an ad for it from another system and direction.
So your information may not leave the TV indirectly, but thsi type of a mechanism does exist in cable tv boxes, etc.
With TVs absorbing the OTT (set top box) functions they are absorbing this too so their claims of how big their market is probably tied to being able to sell advertising into that ecosystem.
It’s likely an unadvertised function only for the benefit and leverage of LG and may be buried in signing your life away to use their “smart” tv functions as well.
A tiny crack in LG tvs can be an attack vector for security and safety. Whether it's audio, or video, or anything.
The best TV is a dumb tv, with all internet disabled and plug in your own smarts that you can hopefully manage better.
A brand is a promise of an experience. This brand has broken a promise and it can’t be pretending it didn’t.
So what? We allow people and corporations to lie under almost all circumstances, including most ads and press releases. Get them under oath, if they still deny spying, that would be a minor news item.
yeah but what about third party analytics packages that may be abusing enterprising or privileged credentials
I think this is all disingenuous and will stay that way until the public asks the right questions to the right people
the CEO of the obvious organization can go in front of Congress and truthfully say “Senator, we are not listening, targeting is based on browsing patterns and data brokers”
while the targeted ads and timelines remain based on all those other inputs, and also audio
> ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV.
So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification.
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.06203v1
We're going to have to get saavy in pulling apart the distinction between "I look at everything and then send a nice summary back to my manufacturer" and "I send everything back to my manufacturer". As AI gets cheaper and more efficient, it'll be baked into everything, and will distill signal at the edge and send the good bits back to central command. I fear the legalese in the ToS will obscure this new way of "not collecting" user information.
It's probably easier to do and every bit as accurate as just using a screenshot.
And it's still exactly what I don't want them doing. There's literally zero reason for LG to be building an advertising profile on me because I was foolish enough to buy one of their TVs. This isn't something that makes their products better, it's spying.
Here's how it's been done in the past
https://www.cameronmacleod.com/blog/how-does-shazam-work
Audio is a bit easier to turn into a fingerprint for identification vs video. Video has a lot of smaller subtle changes that happen from things like compression which make it a lot harder to identify. It's why youtube still hasn't figured out piracy, but they'll knock you immediately if you play 5 seconds of copyrighted music.
When I buy something from the store, my relationship is between me and the store, for the 30 seconds it takes for me to pay for it. I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer. I don't want to be tethered in any way to the manufacturer. I don't want to have an account with the manufacturer. I don't want the device sending anything to the manufacturer, advertising related, telemetry, or even a single bit "user has used your product." Do you get it, manufacturers?? I don't want any kind of relationship with you! I want to purchase my product and use it by myself not with you.
Audio is much easier to fingerprint and match against content.
Wrong. They claim it doesn't record video. Recording means saving permanently - live processing is not recording. ACR is processing the video output live.
Notice what they don't say at all. ACR is just one type of spying. A completely separate feature records what you say from the microphone. They only claimed ACR doesn't do that, which we knew. They did not claim the TV doesn't do that.
This is a carefully crafted PR statement, to avoid saying any lies while making it sound like the accusation was wrong, but it does not actually say the accusation was wrong. We can infer that the likely reason it doesn't say the accusation was wrong is that the accusation is right. Instead, it says several other things, which sound like they are refuting the accusation but are actually refuting other things that nobody said.
It apparently is.
Do you know the Nielsen Ratings? That's exactly how they know what people are watching these days. I've been contacted by them to be one of their subjects. They ship you a device that listens and recognizes based on content. They look for certain "fingerprints" in the audio and match against that - it's not capable of recording our conversations, etc (or so they claimed).
What we watch is not OK to be fed ads, especially if I wasn't using their service to being with and its monitoring the audio from any input to do this.
In this way, smart tvs and smart home devices are effectively hostile devices behind your router at home.
I've been trying to learn how to secure LG TVs, and saw that some people do seem to jailbreak them withan open version of webOS.
When Nielsen first started collecting data (1950s), they handed out diaries to a group of around 5 000 selected households. Nielsen would then collect these diaries and extrapolate viewing patterns across the entire population.
After that came phone surveys. Next step (1980s) was the "people meter", a small box attached to the TV that could automatically detect which channel was tuned and which household members were in the room.
In the 1990s the set-top box made all of that redundant as the cable and satellite providers could directly see which channel every single box was tuned to at all times.
Poor Farnsworth. He just wanted edutainment, man.
If you explained how the box was hooked up, it would be easier to judge whether there was a chance you were correct.
As it is, your description isn’t even clear whether or not the box contains a microphone.
(your car infotainment also likely has nielsen tech in it most likely, as they bought arbitron and gracenote)
It's been done for at least good 15 years.
Spying on people without explicit consent (in a situation where you can say no without penalty) is the issue.
To me, this is really an admission.
- ACR uses audio fingerprinting
- ACR does not collect screen recordings
Both can be true if the TV hashes the frames locally and ACR “collects” the hashes.
In what way? Dramatically lower processing and signature complexity. Audio signature matching is trivial and extremely well known. I see absolutely nothing implausible about this, and it seems a robust, viable solution.
> This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification.
That paper found no such thing. That paper actually demonstrated that they have no clue how the ACR happened, they just demonstrated that playing content yielded content IDs. It is more likely they were witnessing audio ACR happening, exactly as LG described.
so they aren't even denying listening in on everything?
They still claim to get your media's audio, but deny using the microphones.
[0] https://www.lg.com/us/terms
1. The introduction says that Smart TVs are not included in this ToS ("not including Smart TVs").
2. Where do the terms say anything about "sensitive" content? The closest thing I see is section 4.d, but that's just about wiretapping/privacy laws in general.
Other people have mentioned there's other voice features like diction/voice control, so it's plausibly for that.
Gamers Nexus discovered recently, through their "AMD blacklisting" bit (when some relatively minor mid-lifecycle refresh of a product they didn't get a demo unit, so it turned into some "we are the truthsayers!" bit), that doing the Louis Rossmann routine earns them loads of links and clicks. So they're firmly in the cry wolf territory now, and it makes me more dubious of their claims that the people they are questioning.
This whole space is filled with bullshit now. Saw another video where a big channel talks about why TVs are so cheap now, and they then explain it that it's because they sell your data. In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
> In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
Unfortunately that part if your comment is provably false in at least one instance: Vizio. It's a shame, I thought we were on the same page about spreading half truths.
Vizio's numbers are famously public due to its recent sale. We know they lost money on most televisions sold (not all!), and they made it up in ad revenue and content distribution from those TVs. It doesn't prove that LG loses money on its TVs, but it's clearly not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
What is anonymous: we record all the hashs from all the programs people are watching to identify people watching the same thing.
What is not anonymous: we hash all the content in the world, along with hashing the content people are watching, and reconstruct what they watched.
As per HN thread last week
They may be optional features but I’m pretty sure when I set up my tv and got to the screen where you are required to agree to the various terms and privacy legalese the “happy path” was to hit the “accept all” button vs use the remote to navigate into each one, read, and only activate the few required to use the tv. I would not call this dark pattern “optional” by default.
The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record. Putting a remote control listening hardware on a device that runs a plethora of 3rd party apps and with full connection to the internet means that even if LG isn't controlling that mic, someone else will be.
How many other household devices have a microphone whose primary function is orthogonal to recording audio?
Microphones in tvs are a useful accessibility feature when they enable voice commands for the user, and allow them to be used as voice assistants.
They also enable tvs with a camera and microphone to be used as video calling or audio calling interfaces. Used well we get star Trek view screens, used poorly we get little brother monitoring.
For those interested, it turns the tv into an interactive terminal for voice and camera powered video games, which are becoming more popular.
Unfortunately advertising and tracking incentives drive the abuse cases to the top and will crush the positive use cases :(
I'm still not purchasing a television. The last thing I need is more screen time in my life.
Made nearly moot by the presence of microphones in most (all?) modern remotes.
I say nearly moot because its worth noting the ability to operate a physical remote may itself be prohibitive to some.
So in effect, there are a multitude microphones in a modern LG environment.
Edit: also the mic in the remote has a function to calibrate the speakers to the room (correcting for the impulse response of the room basically) which can make the audio much better.
IIRC I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room. Audio quality wasn't perfect, but it making sense what was spoken was good enough.
Some "smart" TVs could do skype in the past, I'm not sure if they needed external headsets of worked with builtin mikes.
Exactly, and recent announcements like Apple normalising always on recording, even wrapped in “big promises” on privacy, deserve a lot more attention and strong regulation.
LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612329 - Sept 2026 (359 comments)
GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605424 - Sept 2026 (133 comments)
A Screensaver for LG's Spying Smart TVs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605356 - Sept 2026 (13 comments)
LG TVs aren't the only ones spying on you [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49575176 - Sept 2026 (18 comments)
Their statements don’t align with the reality I’ve experienced as a customer. My TV is not connected to the network, because the setup process left me with 0 trust that LG wouldn’t be collecting information regardless of my settings, or that I didn’t miss something. There was also the risk that they’d add a new “feature” with an update which would I’d be automatically opted in to.
Until they start selling truly dumb TVs, I’m not going to trust anything and their statements fall flat.
Opt-in used to mean that it was disabled until you explicitly click somewhere to enable it.
Opt-in: take action to have the feature.
Opt-out: take action to not have the feature.
> ACR is an optional feature that is turned off by default. To enable ACR, a user must accept LG’s Viewing Information Agreement, which describes how ACR works.
Which I take to mean that when you agree to the terms, it enables the feature.
The only alternative would be to not accept the agreement and return the TV to the store, because there would be no way to go through the setup and actually use the TV.
I can't remember if this agreement was forced during the last setup I did, but most of these agreements are forced. There is no way to not check a box and still use the device with the desired featured turned off out of the gate.
Maybe they technically have it opt-out, but from a user perspective, that's not the experience. This is a dark pattern and their framing around this solidifies that I will never buy another LG product.
Take that LG legal dept.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&t=358s
Anyway, last year my phone died and I bought a new one made by Samsung. I had to opt out of collection like 4 or 5 times with confusing buttons, and there is a lot of crapware installed by default, and then the phone offered to install two additional apps. I almost sure I said no, but one of them got installed anyway.
LG adopted the "Maybe Later" dark pattern for opt-in to ACR, at least in some markets. Though I guess you never know for sure with A/B testing.
> 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”
I don't know how LG TVs do it, but e.g. many smartphones use a dedicated ASIC/audio processing chip that does not really record anything, but specifically listens for the wake word and discards all other audio to save power/battery life. I think this distinction is relevant, because there is a huge privacy difference between streaming a live audio stream to the cloud to detect a wake word and a specialized audio processor that has a small buffer only for detecting the wake word, where the audio does not leave that processor.
Theoretically, you could call that few-second buffer recording, but I don't think that would be collecting/recording ambient conversations to most people, since it's ephemeral and does not leave your device.
The question, of course, is what happens in LG TVs.
No, it's arguably accurate because "record" implies it's being persisted. Otherwise something as simple as a sound meter (which needs a microphone to operate) is "recording".
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.
Well this is a silly assumption. Wake word false positives happen all the time. (“No Siri, I wasn’t talking to you…”)
Nearby, another AcmeTV or business partner device picks up the sound and sends it to AcmeHQ.
The former device "never transmits your viewing behavior to Acme". The latter device "never records your viewing behavior".
Or, in a heavily-paraphrased nutshell:
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".
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.
lol no https://apnews.com/article/amazon-privacy-echo-7fb3c19fa7f66...
> When I worked for Alexa
Look I know it's easy to believe these things when your paycheck depends upon it, god knows I've convinced myself of a convenient fact or two when it was necessary for me to get through the day. But afterwards, without a financial interest, you owe it to yourself to go back and think about it again.
Is this what is done with the "Audio was not intended for this device" entries in the Review Alexa History section of the Alexa app?
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.
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.
[0] https://weowntheglass.com
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.
Its looks like the sort of stuff that happens to a tragic fantasy hero after a Faustian deal. Except they would've asked for riches, love or eternal youth, we on the other hand just want our middling-quality tv to work.
And that's where the problem is.
TVs should be TVs. Phones should be phones. Cars should be cars. If the manufacturers can't help themselves adding other stuff that is for their own benefit and not the product owner's and some of it so bad that it needs legal weasel words to CTA and competition in the market is insufficient to kill these practices off then it's time for heavy-handed regulation.
Maybe we say you can't sell any product in these categories in our country with any remote connectivity at all except for specifically permitted uses. Maybe the penalty for wilful violation is a warning with a big fine. Maybe the penalty for repeated wilful violation is fines that are an existential threat to the business and personally barring the corporate executives from holding corporate office for the next five years. That kind of thing.
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.
source: i made it up
That case sure put Mark Russinovich on everyone’s radars, at least.
Good times.
As the saying goes, this is what radicalized me. If any one of us did anything close to this we would be treated like Aaron Swartz and given a 35+ year prison sentence.
But in the Sony case the DOJ didn't even threaten criminal charges.
I still have an 1080p TV because I can't be arsed to do the research on what 4k TV won't spy on me.
It helps that most "content" isn't worth 4k anyway.
So the TV gets advertised as "$$$, but basically $$ if you sign up to be surveilled and get a $/month check back." If the company sets $/month too low--or is too creepy about what they collect--people just won't opt-in.
But what happens if they promise big pay-backs but routinely cancel from their side? That's a problem, but at least it's a kind "the market" can handle when it comes to reputation and bad reviews.
Also they provided a statement earlier to Gizmodo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628328
I am absolutely certain that ACR was enabled on our new TV by default, back some years ago. I am nearly certain their voice recognition, and advertising spying were enabled on our TV by default.
If none of this is truly "enabled by default" then this is a recent development.
I discovered this many years ago and did some deep dives, and unfortunately didn't publish anything about it. Lesson learned.
I really wish there was a better way to do a media center linux.
Disconnecting “smart tv” from internet to use Apple TV is possible and might work, but you will get nagged to reconnect all the time. And TV mfr will eventually try to find workarounds - purchase access to wireless connections from large-footprint connectivity providers (Xfinity WIFI, 4g/5g networks, etc) or create a p2p network among their own connected devices. I doubt they do it right now as it’s less profitable to focus on niche audience, but eventually it might become profitable enough.
Our approach is guided by four principles:
Transparency – Helping users understand how smart TV features work and how related data may be used.
User Choice – Giving users meaningful control over optional features and services.
Informed Consent – Supporting informed decisions through clear and manageable consent choices.
Continuous Improvement – Continuously improving privacy controls, transparency, and security protections.
--------------------
Transparency:
This document isn't terribly easy to understand by the standards of traditional TV's. You have to pay close attention to figure out what is and isn't going on, and when. It also should have been taped to the front of every LG TV when it comes out of the box.
User Choice:
There is extensive explanation of how what LG TV's are doing isn't nefarious, but the fact remains that there's no switch to turn it off. Why not just put a simple hardware on/off switch on these TV"s to turn off all connectivity? Maybe some users want dumb TV's, or maybe they just don't want to worry about all of this.
Informed Consent:
Buyers apparently consented to this at the store. Now you're finally informing them. That's now how informed consent works.
Continuous Improvement:
I'll believe LG and other Smart TV manufacturers are serious about this when they add a hardware wifi on/off switch, and not a moment before.
Instead, I connect a Google TV Streamer, as I'm in the Google ecosystem. For my friends in the Apple ecosystem, I tell them to do the same with an Apple TV box.
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.
So, was realme transcribing all conversations and uploading it? Can someone answer?
For example, let's say an ad network knows your and your friends' location, and knows you've met because you've been close together frequently, or are using the same wifi network. You talk about perfumes, then later one of them looks up perfumes on their phone. Google would usually have access to this much metadata, and will likely serve you perfume ads because of your friend who later looked it up.
This doesn't directly answer your question though. The answer would be - it's possible, but a lot is possible without that.
[1] https://archive.is/OyuUO
It's more likely that this is all due to external forces. Having your device on the same network, in close enough proximity to detect each other, for instance, combined with one of your friends having Googled the stuff you were talking about.
Or just basic data collection. There's the classic story about how supermarkets know you're pregnant before you do, just based on the groceries you buy (no, not pregnancy tests). Ad networks buy and collect a humongous amount of information about everyone and serve ultra specific targeted ads based on nothing more than pattern matching based on what the rest of humanity is doing.
It's impossible to rule out that the thing did run a 24/7 TTS service, but I think the depressing fact that ad networks don't need to listen to our conversations to know what we're talking about is more probable.
And your phone most likely already listens all the time to catch an "Hey, Google" (or something similar).
For example, last week I was complaining to my spouse about shoulder pain and how I was afraid I may need another surgery. YouTube has suddenly starting flooding my feed with videos about "shoulder exercises to avoid surgery." I hadn't searched any of those terms, purchased anything or visited an orthopedic, so I don't know what else could possibly explain it.
That’s the next possibility to eliminate.
I am positive I get ads based on the interests of other people the wifi where I live.
"Do not continuously record or transmit"
Soooo....
They noted the discovery traffic with Wireshark, and commented on LG boasting about how many connected devices their networks can see.
This remains to be a larger issue than the clear fact LG TVs can easily be used as remote spy devices, even when offline, by wirelessly remote connected agents.
OLED productions costs have fallen, and the yields have gotten better — displays of all kinds have gotten cheaper, not just TVs; OLEDs have started showing up in products they haven’t before for cost reasons, etc.
The manufacturers make some profit on the data they harvest, sure; but the biggest BOM costs of TVs have definitely also dropped sharply.
Companies like Vizio make vastly more on the ads and data than they do on the tvs.
Some quarters they even take a loss. They took a $7m bath on hardware while booking about $120m on ads and data.
We’re never getting good tv’s back. It’s only going to get worse. Now they’re starting in on monitors.
The only lifeline would be consumer protection, which obviously won’t happen in the US.
When they spend 400 on a tv and sell it for 410 and sell the data for 40 it doesn’t mean the data makes 4 times as much as the tv. The cost of gathering that data is still 400, they have nothing to sell without spending 409 in the hardware.
They have good accountants isn’t it?
Unless this stuff is made literally illegal they will keep doing it, because it's far more profitable than the alternatives. This is precisely why ideas like paying for a privacy respecting option on Facebook could never work.
from: https://web.archive.org/web/20201201175708/http://blog.ptsec...
Highly efficient" is 25mW at 33MHz. According to the Wikipedia page, it can run even when the PC is off but plugged in or connected to battery. an ARM Cortex M0-4 will use even less power in idle. All it needs is a tiny capacitor and bootrom and a secret flash storage to record audio and upload it once internet becomes available
"The Intel Management Engine always runs as long as the motherboard is receiving power, even when the computer is turned off. This issue can be mitigated with the deployment of a hardware device which is able to disconnect all connections to mains power as well as all internal forms of energy storage. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some security researchers have voiced concern that the Management Engine is a backdoor.
Intel's main competitor, AMD, has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of its post-2013 CPUs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
There are countless low or passive power audio devices since the Thing that can record and upload/bounce audio to receiveing devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
Go figure. People are strange.
And yes, that ME and PSP are on every cpu since I can't remember, Thinkpad T60 was probably one of the last ones without spy tech.
Trust broken, words out, and their statement doesn’t really do anything to mending that.
Exactly this. Search for a mini PC and it'll have a cheap Intel SoC in it that performs way better than a Raspberry Pi 5 but cheaper (comes with everything for ~$300), and even consumes a similar amount of power.
https://youtu.be/krj5NM-6tfU
Every day I want to keep tech more fenced and far from me and only use it for what I need.
We should have laws that limit this kinda of “agreements”
It's insane that something you purchase can force a post purchase EULA before it can do anything.
Imagine buying a shirt but there's a 10 page EULA that says you agree to arbitration as soon as you break the seal. Or a blender, or an oven, or a refrigerator.
A lot of the "smart" electronics are in fact just that, they are sneaking in EULAs to use an app to connect to the device which robs you of your rights and protections as a consumer "Oh, the law says we have to give a 10 year warranty, but unfortunately you installed our app to work with your device which says you agree to forgo the warranty and pay us for the right to sue".
https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/
The problem is the capacity to litigate is far surpassed by the world's speed and volume of doing bad.
This is a case where companies' actions should be treated like parking tickets: a fine is issued summarily, with option to appeal, not a slow process of litigation having to happen before a fine is issued.
LG is truly an adversial party in all of this.
It’s of little concern to me that the threat is theoretical when it’s only a matter of time before a script kiddy or some bored guy with a YouTube tutorial and $20 of AI credits sets it up himself, let alone well-funded groups or motivated actors.
Unmanaged IOT devices in general are not to be trusted. LG isn’t leading with transparency nor are they big enough like Microsoft or Apple to put out bug bounties and audits with hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on them. They make the device that sits in the corner of your living room and is forgotten about. They’re being cagey about the data they collect and how they collect it, and I’m asked to take the risk on “trust me bro” and “you’re required to tell anyone within earshot of the TV’s mic that they’re being recorded”? Fuck that.
Never mind that data being exposed even if encrypted is a risk all its own: the collection can start now, and whenever it’s detected and blocked it’s too late. It can be cracked later whenever they have the tech and the time.
It’s basically stealing.
Would you want some device connecting to your network that is not under your control?
And before you answer “well, you should lock it down,” yes, that’s true, but we do not blame the victim if they fail to do so. An unlocked door is not an invitation.
A TV not on the Internet is basically worthless these days, unless you have a third-party streaming device like a Fire or Shield--and then you're just moving the trust point from the TV itself to the streaming device, and the same concerns exist. Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
That's exactly the sort of thing I could see LG piggy backing on. Your neighbor might have spectrum so the LG TV connects to it's private network to phone home.
If you live in a dense city, there's a good chance you can reach an open network. When I lived in midtown Manhattan, there were around 500 SSIDs reachable from my apartment.
We use a Kubuntu Linux laptop behind the TV with a wireless mouse and keyboard (for searching and stuff), stream in Chrome, works great. And yes, we trust this combination.
> Do you trust Amazon any more than you trust LG?
We don't use Amazon device products just because we use Kubuntu Linux on PC's in our home but yes based on LG's behavior we trust Amazon more and we don't put our LG TV or any of our LG appliances we bought a few years ago, on the Internet.
Forgot to mention - there were no improvements whatsoever in terms of functionality.
From their statement. This entire thing is contradictory. You cannot both say "not converted to text, stored, or transmitted", while at the same time saying the results may be generated and stored in the form of logs.
We need to hold companies responsible for this shit.
They made customers feel like suckers for trusting the Brand.
Their LG logo was literally on the signed evidence. What a bunch of clowns getting exposed by community reporters. Thanks Steve. =3
What is that? And why does it only happen on that website?
Connect your own devices and smarts to it.
A broader issue is that it does any kind of recording, or processing of the signals around the tv (from a microphone) or what is displayed on the tv (image) is both extremely private.
Privacy has been violated by LG according to their own wording. a way that is not controlled by settings.
What might LG want with an anonymized hash of the audio being played or shown on someone's screen?
Existing ad matching technology can link it with the video of what you're watching to build a shadow profile of you and then sell the attention of your eyeballs to advertising.
From there, simply what you watch, at what time, for how long roughly sets up a wonderful demographic of age, gender, interests, and all that fun stuff. This is an area of tv and video advertisign that has existed for a long time including online and cable tv boxes.
LG's statement that it doesn't move your info anywhere about what is being watched via audio seems to be a variant of this. Using the audio fingerprint, their software could request an ad for it from another system and direction.
So your information may not leave the TV indirectly, but thsi type of a mechanism does exist in cable tv boxes, etc.
With TVs absorbing the OTT (set top box) functions they are absorbing this too so their claims of how big their market is probably tied to being able to sell advertising into that ecosystem.
It’s likely an unadvertised function only for the benefit and leverage of LG and may be buried in signing your life away to use their “smart” tv functions as well.
A tiny crack in LG tvs can be an attack vector for security and safety. Whether it's audio, or video, or anything.
The best TV is a dumb tv, with all internet disabled and plug in your own smarts that you can hopefully manage better.
A brand is a promise of an experience. This brand has broken a promise and it can’t be pretending it didn’t.
I.e: these will probably trickle down to me
I think this is all disingenuous and will stay that way until the public asks the right questions to the right people
the CEO of the obvious organization can go in front of Congress and truthfully say “Senator, we are not listening, targeting is based on browsing patterns and data brokers”
while the targeted ads and timelines remain based on all those other inputs, and also audio