Your TV is spying on you, and it's worse than you think.
In a world where predictive policing is becoming more commonplace, TVs that report on what you're watching, record you using live mics, and scan your network for connected devices are a liability.
Link: LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby, by Dominic Preston in The Verge
This is an enormous abuse of trust:
“LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even when offline or on standby mode. […] Packet captures showed the TVs scanning the local area network for nearby hardware like phones or smartwatches, as well as logging location data and details of nearby Wi-Fi networks, and feeding the information back to LG Ad Solutions. Perhaps more concerningly, the TVs were capable of recording microphone audio when in standby; this continued even after the TV was disconnected from the internet, with audio files stored offline and uploaded once a connection was restored.”
Most households invite at least one television into their homes. It’s almost impossible to buy one without smart TV features; because most television shows are streamed over the internet these days, they’re usually online. You could leave the TV offline while connecting it to a separate box like an Apple TV, but it’ll keep nagging you to connect.
The contract should look like this: you pay for a TV and it shows you stuff. The idea that it will scan your local network for devices, determine what content you like to watch, and maybe even listen to you using a built-in microphone is not something that anybody signs up for. Someone somewhere at LG has been so incentivized to make a graph go up and to the right that they have decided that basic ethical tenets like privacy and transparency aren’t worth holding on to.
That’s particularly important in a world where the Department of Homeland Security has created Minority Report-style Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams who instruct police to pull people over based on profiled data like their financial activity, despite there being no evidence that they have committed a crime. Data from disparate sources is routinely bought by law enforcement and agencies like DHS in order to create these sorts of profiles; a connected TV in your home could easily contribute. Are you watching the wrong kind of content? Automatic Content Recognition could rat you out. Are the devices connected to your home network outside of the norm? Up goes a flag.
So that’s homes. But most offices have TVs installed somewhere, too. Consider that an installed smart TV could easily be snooping on network devices, content, and even video calls conducted over these screens. Some more sophisticated offices will have them set to a less privileged network or insist on them remaining offline; most will dutifully connect them up. The result is a live microphone and content recognition tech installed in newsrooms, universities, non-profits, and businesses around the country.
Manufacturers like LG can sell this data. They will likely argue that it keeps TV prices down – and maybe that’s true. But this reporting comes after LG promised regulators in Texas to stop collecting viewing data without informed consent; there’s a second mic that may continue recording even when the main microphone setting has been turned off. They’ve shown they cannot be trusted. This kind of invisible data gathering should be illegal. Nobody signed up to be spied on; they just want to watch TV.
