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Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Take that LG legal dept.

see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&t=358s

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.

They were just bringing levity to an otherwise depressing topic.

I would also bet that they didn't actually have any alcohol in their drinking vessels at the time of filming.

New to the concept of parody? They are pointing out the absurdity of the idea that a click to accept shrinkwrap ToS lets LG infringe the rights of whoever talks in front of the TV.

I personally would not trust legal advice from YouTubers who make money from whatever "content" generates the most views. The more outrageous and controversial the better, making sense or being true a distant secondary priority. Even those who make a name for themselves as trustworthy tend to eventually succomb to the incentives of the algorithm if it's their day job.

It's clear that you don't know anything about guys at GN.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hey another benefit of never agreeing to the ToS!

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