LG: No. ACR in LG TVs does not collect or store screenshots, screen images, screen recordings...
Hold on, we already know this is not true. There is even an option in the settings to disable this (which is usually automatically reverted by LG within a week).
note they didn't say "LG TVs do not…" which might indicate whatever lawyer drafted this found a vaguely legally plausible way to attribute that to something other than ACR
Interesting that in the beginning it says 'We know that many TVs use automatic content recognition (ACR)' but according to answers none of those manufacturers do.
So which TVs do the ACRs, and why Verge did not send those questions to them? Hisense?
Sony Bravia TVs, at least the 2015 model, bundle the tv.samba.ssm package, and the TV made periodic requests to the samba.tv domain without opting into anything. Samba TV is a spyware company in the ACR business.
None of the manufacturers who answered that question admitted to using ACR via screenshot. LG uses audio samples, which is basically the same. Google admitted that some of their hardware OEMs may install ACR. Sony and Hisense didn't answer, but have both been reported to use ACR. The TCL TVs that come with Roku I assume do it as well.
That the Television Business transformed from a) an advertising conduit to b) a propaganda conduit to c) a live-surveillance technology tells you all you need to know.
Whether the Corporations answer your questions or not, their claims of doing The Right Thing are untrustworthy.
Have to make it regulation and law, with penalties for lying. Regime change has made this more likely, call your Congressional representative. Loop in Louis Rossmann and fulu.org if necessary.
It is fundamentally a citizen data security and data privacy issue, which only regulation and the law can solve for (i argue, based on all available evidence and information). But asking nicely or trusting corporations and management? lol, rofl even.
Yes, because the price is not subsidized from the selling of personal information.
> “The business model is shifting away from making money on TV sets and instead to making money on ads and data that is delivered by those TV sets,” said Paul Gray, Omdia’s Research Director, Consumer Electronics and Devices, at last week’s HbbTV Symposium in London.
Yes, a common response is not to connect to WiFi, but I'm not 100% persuaded that it's a good answer. I don't connect my Kindle or some medical equipment to WiFi, but somehow they both (possibly Over The Air tech) are shared with the companies. Also, Amazon Sidewalk shares my bandwidth with others nearby against my stated wishes.
Are they shipping TVs with that capability, though? I understand a medical device needing cellular in case wifi goes down, but would they go through that effort for a TV?
Then, someone's going to say that TVs could be automatically connecting to open Wi-Fi networks. I don't think that's a thing any more. I haven't seen any open Wi-Fi networks around me in a long time.
I'd love for a TV to include a 4G/5G connection that they pay for; it'll be hacked for free Internet before the first production run leaves the store shelves.
Practically speaking I would just buy whatever and then not connect it to the internet. (Theoretically if there's an unsecured wifi network with no login requirement in the vicinity the TV could still connect to it and send your data, but no one has demonstrated any TVs actually doing that.)
I was impressed LG answered every question and quite directly, assuming they’re telling the truth.
I was quite disappointed in Apple for dodging so many of them and giving non-answers. They need to tone down the corporate speak and take a lesson from LG.
When asked if a user can erase everything the correct answer is not a thesis on privacy, it’s saying “Choosing Erase all settings and data will remove everything on the device back to factory fresh state”. They already have the perfect answer.
Apple has good answers for many of the questions they skipped too. But they look bad by not even trying to answer.
What makes you defend Apple when they won't defend themselves? If they have good answers why did they evade the question? Is it possible your basis for your belief they have good answers has changed and those answers will no longer be "good"?
The problem is the regulators in the US are in bed with the companies so they can say whatever and do the complete opposite and then get fined a trivial amount of money and just keep doing it
Yeah. This is exactly the problem. There is too much of a disconnect from the action to the impact in this case. I think if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.
But nearly everyone has more urgent and pressing concerns like making monthly rent or a medical bill or gas money. So ACR on a TV doesn't register.
> if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.
What are the chances of an individual being negatively affected in a serious way?
Intuitively, I expect it to be so negligible that it isn't worth losing sleep over.
I would say the chances of a negative impact is on par with the chances of negative impacts on most of the hottest debate topics such as guns and abortion. Identity theft, swatting/doxxing, and stalking can have serious impacts and are not that uncommon. They're just uncommon enough that most people don't care until it happens to them.
This is one of those things that is hard to quantify. Although I'm sure some has. It negatively impacts society overall very slowly over time. It has the effect of eroding private life in subtle way that it's barely noticeable until we find ourselves in a surveillance state where corruption is everywhere. Let me know if that sounds familiar to you.
I did a presentation on surveillance capitalism awhile back[0]
It's more profitable for LG to sell your data to advertisers than to build and sell the TV itself
The negative effect is the exact sky high prices that Americans keep complaining about. The point of all that advertising data is to nudge you towards accepting higher prices or buying things you otherwise wouldn't.
Every dollar of revenue in the advertising industry is money taken from consumers and spent on unproductive waste to get you to spend more money instead of anything like making a product better or investing in capacity or researching and developing new products.
Google makes money by making you spend more money. Facebook makes money by making you spend more money.
I really don't think most people would care more when you show them examples of others. Some people would, but most would not. We see this all the time with legislation around rights in the US. Much of the voting population lack the capacity for deep critical thought and don't care to practice empathy from even a devil's advocate perspective. Stuff like tracking speech/identity online, abortion debate, gun debate, etc. Nobody cares unless they are directly affected.
Take guns for example. If you use guns, then you see a value to them and generally oppose mire restrictions. If you have been shot or robbed with a gun (or know people who have), then you dont see the value of guns and want more restrictions. If you are neither of these things then its easy to not care and say sure to more restrictions because they don't impact you and aound like they might provide some benefit, especially if just looking at the surfqce level stats. Same concept for abortion and online tracking/identity, especially once you mix in the think-of-the-children arguments in each of these.
Or because it's so secretive the people don't even know the source was from their device spying on them. "Oh, some hacker on the darknet stole my data" is the track that many non-tech people would see this.
The worst thing for privacy advocates is that there has yet to be a general public reckoning with the ad-economy of the last 20 years.
For all intents and purposes, the average person who has paid no mind to their privacy over that time period is really no better or worse off than the person who has devoted hours to combating all forms of invasion.
If there was a mass scale visible event of privacy loss, i.e. Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands who decides to start very publicly embarrassing random people with privately collected data, there would be very swift and immediate action (yes the parallels here are not lost on me, scale is the difference)
Just look at datacenters. The public didn't even know what a DC was 6 months ago, and now politicians are getting elected to ban them. What happened? AI gave the mass public a common sensation of fear. Privacy has still not had it's "AI fear" moment.
You see that, Timmy? Every time someone complains about something, somenone says that it happens because no one cares. What’s the logical conclusion, then? To not care yourself. Because it would be too difficult to change anything if you’re completely alone. And so you have thousands of people each in their own bubble, each thinking that they are alone in caring about, well, anything, and that therefore nothing can be done.
Because they have other things to worry about. Certainly you realize how privileged a world you have to live in to be able to spend time worrying about whether your TV is spying on you, right?
You put those things in the same sentence but they don't even remotely carry the same weight. People are sick and dying and have to weigh weather or not they want to declare bankruptcy or go to the doctor. Or buy their medication vs buying food. Their TV serving them directed ads isn't even in the same universe.
On the flipside, how fucked up the world is that TVs spying on you had become normalized.
The problem isn't with people being too busy, it shouldn't be up to the people, it should be a government regulation problem. There's a lot of 'todo' around potential breaches of PII, so why not do something about the ridiculously large and seemingly increasing trade in exactly that from almost anything you purchase nowadays, including the place you purchase it from. And they're all selling it to aggregators and advertisers and any other shady c*nt with enough cash to buy it.
... and now it's all going to be fed into AI for additional pattern matching and de-aggregation and re-identification, because that's where the return on investment is. And once it's in there, there ain't no cleaning it out again. You're in the corpus, all your personality fingerprints, forever.
Gross governmental negligence across the entire West.
The news? Or the underprivileged? The news doesn’t cater to the underprivileged in general, and might well be “in bed with” companies on this point.
It’s curious this ritual of relatively well-off individuals—and your bio supports that theory—pointing fingers at each other for having privilege. Certainly when they are talking about a topic that affects everyone with a TV, not whatever people of their means get up to that the underprivilged don’t.
People who care could do the work for all of us. It’s not like everyone needs to care about surveillance in television gadgets in order to make a difference.
Or, you know, not necessarily that focused. The comment you are replying to just said that the news are in bed with companies. That often generalizes beyond tech gadgets.
I was disappointed that the article described Apple's answers to some questions as not direct. They should have published the indirect answer. Let the reader judge the answers.
Disagree - when a company responds with mealy-mouthed corporate gruel, designed in bad faith to obfuscate and distract, there should be no obligation on the part of the investigator to propagate it.
Why not both? Have the reporter editorialize in the article itself but link to sources and references including the full response as a way of showing their work and letting readers validate.
I'd argue that this just descends into sophistry. If the journalist isn't as convincing as the corporate speak, the company could potentially pull the wool over a reader's eyes.
I think "chose not to provide a direct answer" is pretty clearly "technically they responded, but they waffled about in such a way as to have provided no meaningful information".
The article isn't sponsored and so is under no obligation to reproduce what likely amounts to ad copy.
That is called gate keeping or hoarding information. I read other answers that were full of weasel words and yet still published. Censoring is not the same as quoting.
Because the traditional press believes their readers are idiots that cannot think for themselves and so they require "the reporter" to interpret for them and tell them what to think about whatever topic the article concerns. This is also a big reason why traditional press outlets never link to original sources on their websites when such sources actually exist (despite the entire point of "the web" being to link together disparate sources)[1]. Doing so would mean their readers are not dependent upon them, the priests in the high castle, for learning what the priests want them to learn.
[1] The other part of the reason, and the one they will admit to publicly if pressed, is to maintain their ad revenue by not providing exit paths for their readers.
Ironic how two opinions can be completely opposite, yet both valid and well-founded, and unverifiable at the same time.
I personally believe that journalists should do their job and decide what gets written and how, and save readers from drowning in information we have too much of anyway.
The premise of the article was we asked 11 companies 17 questions about their "TV" product.
The article singled out only 1 company to not publish non-responsive answers. That only does one thing how bad an answer could it be to not be publishable?
Asking boards to volunteer information that harms their business revenue model is a suckers bet. Journalists have a tough job wading through the nonsense. =3
Does Dell manufacture monitors with Internet connection and/or microphones?
Worst they could do would be through an automatically installed driver (on Windows, like LG did).
The setting has the obvious name of "Live Plus".
So which TVs do the ACRs, and why Verge did not send those questions to them? Hisense?
Here's the APK in case you'd like to take a closer look: https://files.zajc.tel/unlist/6361bb6b86f2ed10e2e75a0deb3269...
They definitely do, I have a little snippet on their image recognition ACR from when I hacked my Roku TV here: https://blog.ammaraskar.com/roku-tv-philips-hues/#reverse-en...
That the Television Business transformed from a) an advertising conduit to b) a propaganda conduit to c) a live-surveillance technology tells you all you need to know.
Whether the Corporations answer your questions or not, their claims of doing The Right Thing are untrustworthy.
It is fundamentally a citizen data security and data privacy issue, which only regulation and the law can solve for (i argue, based on all available evidence and information). But asking nicely or trusting corporations and management? lol, rofl even.
Conventional advice is to buy a smart TV and never connect it to the internet. Just plug in [device of your choice] to HDMI.
Yes, because the price is not subsidized from the selling of personal information.
> “The business model is shifting away from making money on TV sets and instead to making money on ads and data that is delivered by those TV sets,” said Paul Gray, Omdia’s Research Director, Consumer Electronics and Devices, at last week’s HbbTV Symposium in London.
* https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2024/11/18/tv-companies-sell...
I'd love for a TV to include a 4G/5G connection that they pay for; it'll be hacked for free Internet before the first production run leaves the store shelves.
3 HDMI ports. Any downsides using as a TV?
Reposting from nine days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50332351
Maybe gotta find one used from a business offloading their old ones.
* https://www.samsung.com/us/business/commercial-tvs/all-comme...
I was quite disappointed in Apple for dodging so many of them and giving non-answers. They need to tone down the corporate speak and take a lesson from LG.
When asked if a user can erase everything the correct answer is not a thesis on privacy, it’s saying “Choosing Erase all settings and data will remove everything on the device back to factory fresh state”. They already have the perfect answer.
Apple has good answers for many of the questions they skipped too. But they look bad by not even trying to answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference
But nearly everyone has more urgent and pressing concerns like making monthly rent or a medical bill or gas money. So ACR on a TV doesn't register.
What are the chances of an individual being negatively affected in a serious way?
Intuitively, I expect it to be so negligible that it isn't worth losing sleep over.
I did a presentation on surveillance capitalism awhile back[0]
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/presentations/overcoming-survei...
The negative effect is the exact sky high prices that Americans keep complaining about. The point of all that advertising data is to nudge you towards accepting higher prices or buying things you otherwise wouldn't.
Every dollar of revenue in the advertising industry is money taken from consumers and spent on unproductive waste to get you to spend more money instead of anything like making a product better or investing in capacity or researching and developing new products.
Google makes money by making you spend more money. Facebook makes money by making you spend more money.
Perhaps if said individual is a politician and a television is compromised to record what happens in their home (or even bedroom).
Or perhaps compromise televisions in hotel rooms (politician or not).
Take guns for example. If you use guns, then you see a value to them and generally oppose mire restrictions. If you have been shot or robbed with a gun (or know people who have), then you dont see the value of guns and want more restrictions. If you are neither of these things then its easy to not care and say sure to more restrictions because they don't impact you and aound like they might provide some benefit, especially if just looking at the surfqce level stats. Same concept for abortion and online tracking/identity, especially once you mix in the think-of-the-children arguments in each of these.
For all intents and purposes, the average person who has paid no mind to their privacy over that time period is really no better or worse off than the person who has devoted hours to combating all forms of invasion.
If there was a mass scale visible event of privacy loss, i.e. Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands who decides to start very publicly embarrassing random people with privately collected data, there would be very swift and immediate action (yes the parallels here are not lost on me, scale is the difference)
Just look at datacenters. The public didn't even know what a DC was 6 months ago, and now politicians are getting elected to ban them. What happened? AI gave the mass public a common sensation of fear. Privacy has still not had it's "AI fear" moment.
The problem isn't with people being too busy, it shouldn't be up to the people, it should be a government regulation problem. There's a lot of 'todo' around potential breaches of PII, so why not do something about the ridiculously large and seemingly increasing trade in exactly that from almost anything you purchase nowadays, including the place you purchase it from. And they're all selling it to aggregators and advertisers and any other shady c*nt with enough cash to buy it.
... and now it's all going to be fed into AI for additional pattern matching and de-aggregation and re-identification, because that's where the return on investment is. And once it's in there, there ain't no cleaning it out again. You're in the corpus, all your personality fingerprints, forever.
Gross governmental negligence across the entire West.
It’s curious this ritual of relatively well-off individuals—and your bio supports that theory—pointing fingers at each other for having privilege. Certainly when they are talking about a topic that affects everyone with a TV, not whatever people of their means get up to that the underprivilged don’t.
People who care could do the work for all of us. It’s not like everyone needs to care about surveillance in television gadgets in order to make a difference.
Or, you know, not necessarily that focused. The comment you are replying to just said that the news are in bed with companies. That often generalizes beyond tech gadgets.
One would think that should cause more people who are paranoid to reconsider their assumptions and calibrate their concern-level.
I think "chose not to provide a direct answer" is pretty clearly "technically they responded, but they waffled about in such a way as to have provided no meaningful information".
The article isn't sponsored and so is under no obligation to reproduce what likely amounts to ad copy.
Asking for a journalist to please protect me from the direct truth has been a big fuck up in the last century.
[1] The other part of the reason, and the one they will admit to publicly if pressed, is to maintain their ad revenue by not providing exit paths for their readers.
I personally believe that journalists should do their job and decide what gets written and how, and save readers from drowning in information we have too much of anyway.
The article singled out only 1 company to not publish non-responsive answers. That only does one thing how bad an answer could it be to not be publishable?
Or go a step further and build your own Linux HTPC.
Of course if you are already sharing everything about yourself with Google/Amazon/OpenAI/Anthropic then who cares?
And they still managed to answer them in multiple sentences, and sometimes multiple paragraphs.
Toshiba.
Hmm. Not in this list.
If you're in the US it was almost certainly made by Hisense. If you're in Europe it'll be Vestel.