Technology

Haha very happy my LG C1 has never met an Ethernet cable or WiFi connection but honestly wouldn't be surprised to hear they're doing shady things anyway like trying to access unlocked connections or recording everything for the future anyway

Yet another company going "NO WE DIDN'T", expecting us to believe.

One thing I think a lot of people tend to miss when dealing with executive interviews, PR statements, and company advertising is that often times how a company defines a given term and how the actual dictionary and everyone in the world defines that term are not the same thing unless it is legally required.

Textbook examples:

Telsa, Musk, and self driving: Musk and Tesla define it as essentially what everyone else called lane assist. Then they have "full self driving" for what is supposed to be the thing everyone else would think of as self driving.

OpenAI, Sam Altman, and AGI (artificial general intelligence): No one in the AI industry has an agreed upon definition of what AGI even means. The AI labs just throw it out there for hype and funding rounds and tweak the meaning to them as they need. To most normal people I would suspect AGI means "a machine that knows its a machine and is at least as smart as the average person".

Point being when LG says “ its TVs do not continuously record or transmit users’ conversations,” that can mean literally anything they can twist human communication methods to mean in their specific context. And it is usually the one that makes them the most money.

“We own the glass” is enough for me to never buy an LG again. I own two never contacted to the internet, but Jesus that’s gross.

GN responded to their denial.

TL;DW: LG is using very weasely wording to misrepresent what they’re doing, and GN calls their bluff (with data and receipts)

The response: "we hear you!"

The response, "Look Bryan, you should be the last one to accuse anyone of terrible things when you just casually keep a vibrating replica of smurfette's genitals in your guest bedroom, in the bottom drawer of the left nightstand."

They're sooo sorry

I personally have no misconceptions about the intrusive data collecting, aggregating, identifying and reselling that LG is doing with their residential customers via their televisions, nor about the entitled way LG and its corporate representatives and officers have spoken about their right to gather it.

"We own the glass," they repeat, as though that means they also own whatever is spoken beyond the glass in the same house. In reality, they own neither.

Nor am I misled by LG's weasel words that address problems not ever specifically raised, while completely swerving around actual problems publicly demonstrated with their products.

But I will say they are laboring under a serious misconception if they think I will ever buy one from them. They can fuck ALL the way off with that shit.

After the recent controversies, I added a bunch of blockers for LG trackers to my pi-hole, to stop my 8 year old TV from collecting data. It blocked a lot at first, but then suddenly nothing, I investigated a bit and saw that it had started sending only to their Vietnamese servers, which were missing from my blocklist.

Make sure you block all regions!

I have an LG C3 that I never connected to Wifi or plugged an ethernet cable into. I only use it with my nvidia shield running lineage OS, am I still affected by this / anything I should do?

LG released a statement in which it claims that its “TVs do not continuously record or transmit users’ conversations,”

But with a 100 trigger words?

It's a big corporation so we should believe them. /s

If they were actually wrong about anything, LG would be suing the pants off them right now.

Instead LG are "debunking" claims that weren't actually made.

Not addressing the other areas amounts to confirmation

"We investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong." -LG

(paraphrasing, but)

From just the BSSID these TVs are collecting they know your precise fucking location and can pinpoint it based on signal strength to the nearest street. WiFi Positioning System is cursed. Amazingly, BSSID can also tell you who the customer is based on “public” records since ISPs keep track of this kind of thing when they hand out free routers.

Heres the thing. Its exceptionally easy to see where packets are going on most routers. IP to IP or otherwise.

So yeah, things are going out when you plug in an LG tv. So dont buy it.

Lies Good™

There is also a response to that response up on Gamers Nexus and its something along the lines of: 🖕 + going through the legal agreements detailing what they (may) do with your data + more 🖕

Nuh-uh! -LG