LG: No. ACR in LG TVs does not collect or store screenshots, screen images, screen recordings...
The setting has the obvious name of "Live Plus".
> ACR in LG TVs does not collect or store screenshots, screen images, screen recordings, or video recordings from the TV. Instead, it uses audio fingerprints generated from content audio using the TV’s internal soundboard (not a speaker) to identify the content being viewed.
So based on the fingerprint they know what content is being displayed, but they can say they're not recording your screen.
Maybe he just said that to make a sale, but yeah the fact they offer that targeting alone is quite telling.
You may do LG, or maybe you just think you do. Either way, I won't ever buy your TVs
[1] "James Clapper claims the NSA does not carry out mass surveillance on Americans"; https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-james...
Am I misinterpreting their answer?
... and later ...
"ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology to identify content. Rather than collecting screenshots, screen recordings, or visual content from the TV screen, ACR extracts a digital fingerprint of the TV content being viewed using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker). ACR does not collect or store voice recordings, other audio recordings, screenshots, screen images, or video recordings from the TV."
From here: https://www.lg.com/global/newsroom/news/statements/statement...
Actually keeping screenshots would be expensive. They of course don't care what the content is. You care what the PGP content is.
They care about what you're watching, so in the dystopian future, they can tell a government that your bin of hashes are 90% banned content and you should be denaturalized because you're clearly a communist cross-dressing monkey from mars.
It's bizarre you think it's equal to knowing a PGP key. It's not, the point is the database of hashes are good enough to tell them things about you. They could do a lot of different malicious things with that knowledge, primarily because it's not anonymous information. They likely have GPS, so they know where you are at the same time, even not having GPS, they include wifi, and some have cellular chips.
If you think what we're talking about equates to PGP, you are seriously confused about how privacy works.
So which TVs do the ACRs, and why Verge did not send those questions to them? Hisense?
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...
I think they're using "collect" to mean something specific and "store" to mean something specific, neither of which fit our definition of collect and store.
Here's the APK in case you'd like to take a closer look: https://files.zajc.tel/unlist/6361bb6b86f2ed10e2e75a0deb3269...
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.
(i am joking but the cognitive dissonance about telemetry is so stupid. you are watching TV on a subscription service, someone already knows who is watching what.)
These companies get away with these things in part because they can point to users accepting some agreement by using the service where clause 12 subsection 4 addendum C says they can do it, using some terminology nobody reads or understands.
you are running jellyfin on a device, like a NAS. it reports telemetry. docker reports telemetry. you download jellyfin, microsoft gets the telemetry. you update jellyfin, it gets the telemetry. you download radarr, docker and microsoft get the telemetry... all of this stuff reports telemetry. github, you can see your own repositories' usage and telemetry! graphs/traffic. it's all there...
Etc...
But there is a difference between the company whose services I use knowing about the service use, and the television mfg knowing about all of my activity.
The public wifi one is funny. It seems totally like something they'd do, but totally open wifi doesn't really exist anymore so the window for that scam is likely closed. I doubt they'll bother with it at this point.
More likely would be cutting Comcast in on things in return for using the public wifi channels they have on their customer's routers that they already use for cell service. But it might be easier/cheaper to just make not connecting to wifi more and more painful for customers instead though, you only need to trick/wear down one user of the household to win this battle so if they just slowly turn up the harassment feature they'll get 99% of people in the end.
The interviewer asked "Does disconnecting a TV from the internet prevent all these forms of data transmission?". Obviously if the TV is completely disconnected from any internet connection then it can't transmit the data, but that would require removing the wifi radio itself.
Disconnecting the TV from your home wifi still means they can try to connect to any other public wifi. Samsung were the only ones who explicitly addressed that in their answer: "Samsung TVs do not connect to open Wi-Fi networks on their own."
It's just usually with Smart TV articles, someone takes a break from their Black Helicopters Tracking app to show up and repeat it.
Conventional advice is to buy a smart TV and never connect it to the internet. Just plug in [device of your choice] to HDMI.
I opened up my LG TV because I saw it doing aggressive wifi scanning even when the wifi was "disabled" and physically removed the antenna wire and wrapped the whole guts in RF blocking foil.
I imagine if they were going to strike a deal with the phone companies they’d just embed cell chips in the TVs and connect directly.
I've told myself if they start putting 5G in TVs I would either glue a faraday mesh to the back or open up the TV and ground out the antenna or remove the WiFi chip if possible.
If they would keep the spying to matching my shows with programs that are being aired or on popular streaming services, sports, or whether I mute the commercials, that wouldn't bother me. Screen grabs would , especially if I use it on my computer. But history has shown this starts off benign and eventually devolve into listening to the room at all hours and keeping it forever in a Bluffdale data center because "think of the children" / "national security".
That's a strong statement, what's your source?
I’m not sure I believe you? (Not that I can’t believe a company would do something dodgy behind your back, but I just don’t think our phones would go that far off piste - opening a wifi network has battery power implications that I think would have been discovered/widely known before)
Comcast / Xfinity definitely does this. I have gotten many 'suspicious activity' CAPTCHAs on popular websites while using my home internet because of this. The routers provided by Xfinity are very locked down so you can't do anything about it.
Let's not even get into WiFi Motion which uses WiFi to track you inside the house. I'm sure it is enabled by default in most households [1]
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...
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1wbjk0o/sceptre_tv...
The Amazon and Walmart links given on Sceptre's product pages don't link to any televisions. Example: https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U515CV-UMRDD-50-4K-UHD-...
No, it's because their target is businesses which aren't so sensitive to price and like the extended warranty that comes with.
They have microphones and listen to conversations while transcribing the words to listen for "wake words". THey are in fact always awake, and transcribing the words they hear.
They all send telemetry and usage data and they all scan for devices in your home and SSIDs.
The only difference is that you think you can trust these devices vs the TVs which use ACR.
I dont see much of a difference here.
so, no they are not in fact all sending telemetry and usage data
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.
Samsung QB55C-N 55" UHD 4K HDR Commercial Monitor without Wi-Fi
3 HDMI ports. Any downsides using as a TV?
Reposting from nine days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50332351
Sceptre U860CV-UMRD: 4k HDR @ 60 Hz(8 ms), 300 nits LCD(DLED), 3xHDMI 2.0 (HDCP 2.2) ACR, OS: None?
Samsung QB85C-N: 4k HDR @ 75 Hz(10 ms), 350 nits LCD(VA), 3xHDMI 2.0 (HDCP ?) 1xACR, OS: Tizen 7.0, AV1 support
LG 86UR340C9UD: 4k HDR @ 120 Hz (5 ms), 330 nits LCD(DLED), 2xHDMI ? (HDCP 2.0) 1xACR, OS: webOS 6.0
ViewSonic CDE86G3: 4k (not HDR) @ 60 Hz(?? ms), 500 nits LCD(VA), 3xHDMI 2.0 (HCDP 2.2) 1xACR, OS: None?
And, because this is HN, even though it is only 65":
Flanders Scientific: XMP651: 4k HDR @ 60 Hz (?? ms), up to 4000 nits QD-OLED, 1xHDMI ? (no HDCP) 4xSDI, OS: None?
I believe none of these have Wifi. None of them is perfect. Only the Flanders Scientific model has an OLED display, but it is roughly 10x the price of the others (this is a reference monitor, which is very much not targeted at consumers). It also only comes in sizes up to 65" and only has one HDMI port, which does not support HDCP at all. If you only need 55", they have a 2000 nit display (V550) that supports regular HDMI inputs (but is still quite expensive).
Of the remaining displays, the ViewSonic is the brightest, but does not have HDR support. The LG display supports the highest refresh rate and is probably the cheapest, but only has HDCP 2.0 (I think?), and runs webOS, which I view as the least trustworthy of the options. The Samsung display is the only one with built-in AV1 support (if that matters to you). They also have some older models (e.g., BE85FX-H), which may still be available somewhat cheaper, but I can find very little information on them. None of the displays appear to support HDMI 2.1 or 2.2, so 4k HDR is limited 4:2:0 chroma at 60 Hz. The ones labeled "OS: None?" clearly have an OS (the ViewSonic one advertises a 7 second boot time, for example, despite being labeled "OS-Free"), but it does not appear to be any of the major known-problematic ones.
I have no direct experience with any of these, so I cannot prove that they are not still spying on you.
(Wish Apple had an incredible response to every single question, but while I’m still a fan, not going to use this comment as a plug… A little disappointed)
> Nerd Edition
Ooooh the expansion dropped!!
I'm not sure they're not doing something else.
Edit: watch the video "Reverse Engineering Proves What We Suspected All Along" on the Low Level YouTube channel for the example.
* 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.
I know they do have good answers as I use the Apple TV and know what it does. They may not satisfy super hard-core privacy people, but if you’re willing to opt into the Apple ecosystem then within those constraints I think they’re very good.
But thank you for accusing me of being a fanboy. That was very productive.
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.
It's not clear that it isn't already, but you know, lawful evil rather than chaotic evil.
People are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time (and they are capable of placing appropriate energy towards the walking to not trip because they were too focused on the gum chewing...)
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?
For all the company’s who had reponses along the lines of “we don’t do thing X that some others are doing”.. full bets it’s Hisense doing each of these things.
And they still managed to answer them in multiple sentences, and sometimes multiple paragraphs.
Mine only has the Ethernet port, since it has a built in docking station, but they still could take snapshots of what is on my screen. For now, I am trusting DELL a lot more, though. Part of that is having paid about three grand for my U5226KW. At that price they better don't need to spy on me to make money.
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.
OK, but why? Just so you can write an article? All those answers are useless. Even if they were true, a company's policy can change over night. It even says so in the legalese.