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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that would hold up in any court in the world. While sober, and in coordination with legal counsel, they made a plan to accept the terms and conditions. That's like a kid swinging their arms around on a playground while saying "I'm not touching you" levels.
I personally would not trust legal advice from YouTubers who make money from whatever "content" that generates the most views. The more outrageous and controversial the better, making sense or being true a distant secondary priority.
I assume that part was for entertainment, this wouldn't fly in court. But they also show the dark patterns used to make you consent to it, and how certain features seem unaffected by these choices or send one last request when revoking consent.
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.
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.
It also gates some "features" like the "AI" auto-detection of media type to automatically switch the TV between sports, movie, gaming, etc. modes as well. At least from my memory of a recent LG OLED setup.
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.
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.
Why would anyone connect their TV to the Internet? It’s been known for years that it spies, although maybe not to this extent. Or are these TVs auto connecting open WiFi or the neighbor’s Xfinity WiFi?
The vast majority of consumers are not going to spend another $100-300 on a media player device like an Apple TV, Roku, or nVidia shield. They will use the built in app functionality.
And even those who don't - a very surprising to me number people use the "free channels" most TVs ship with. It's like the streaming version of broadcast OTA I guess for a certain consumer segment.
Do you have any evidence of this? The video expose that kicked off this firestorm said that if you don't actively connect to the internet, then the system is largely inert.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
> But what scares me is when every device comes with their own esim and cellular radio.
Cars already do, and the solution is well-known: find the bug, and squash it. Yes, your car will still work, and you cannot be denied warranty because of this. The cellular modem is more or less accessible depending on the make and model.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the quote was taken out of context when they were speaking about vertical integration. "We own the glass" was meant to say that they manufacture the panels themselves and not source them from a 3rd party.
> "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.
>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".
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".
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?
Point taken. Let’s focus on the “ethical implementations do exist” part though. Let’s say a best possible implementation has 99% specificity. Then if it detects audio that has nothing to do with “LG” it mistakenly treats it as LG relevant 1% of the time. So if audio in my living room is 100x more likely to not be relevant for LG, then half of the audio data LG is receiving is not relevant. So what would an ethical specificity be? And what is actual state of the art?
I'd say the bigger issue is not the way it listens for the wake word, it's the recording and processing it does afterwards for a significantly long period of time, recording for much longer than people anticipated, and with a microphone that can pick up conversations from much further away or even behind walls.
This combines with two other dangers, one of unintended recordings when the wake word is triggered unintentionally, and one of intended recordings by third parties based on various other wake/watch words. They already have it in the T&C that they will share this data with law enforcement, so it's not that far fetched that these TVs and other appliances will spy on people in the home far more effectively than even the East German Stasi could have ever imagined.
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.
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.
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 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
158 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 34.3 ms ] threadTheir 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.
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.
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.
Take that LG legal dept.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&t=358s
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.
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 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)
LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers https://doctorbeet.blogspot.com/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging...
HackerNews discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759426
The vast majority of consumers are not going to spend another $100-300 on a media player device like an Apple TV, Roku, or nVidia shield. They will use the built in app functionality.
And even those who don't - a very surprising to me number people use the "free channels" most TVs ship with. It's like the streaming version of broadcast OTA I guess for a certain consumer segment.
Yup. How does that make you feel? Because for me, it was the moment when the border to not only blatantly, but also actively evil was passed.
What is that? And why does it only happen on that website?
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
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.
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.
[0] https://weowntheglass.com
My own self-made guillotine blade is emblazzened with the phrase "why support convicted rapists?"
Definitely a thought-provoker. Nice website.
Cars already do, and the solution is well-known: find the bug, and squash it. Yes, your car will still work, and you cannot be denied warranty because of this. The cellular modem is more or less accessible depending on the make and model.
> 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.
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".
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".
Well this is a silly assumption. Wake word false positives happen all the time. (“No Siri, I wasn’t talking to you…”)
This combines with two other dangers, one of unintended recordings when the wake word is triggered unintentionally, and one of intended recordings by third parties based on various other wake/watch words. They already have it in the T&C that they will share this data with law enforcement, so it's not that far fetched that these TVs and other appliances will spy on people in the home far more effectively than even the East German Stasi could have ever imagined.
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.
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...
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?
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".
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.
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