LG Smart TVs log USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers
doctorbeet.blogspot.com
doctorbeet.blogspot.com
No one want's your shitty software, it's not a competitive edge. No one has ever been impressed by the software their TV comes with, and for every person that found your software easy to use, there is a thousand who are still trying to figure out what that one button does on their remote. You wanna know what people are care about? Picture quality. That's it. That's always been the key. I don't know why you constantly fail to understand that.
Why can't you just make a dumb screen? You know desktop monitors? Like that. No sound, minimal software, but if you really want to get fancy, maybe a nice small remote to turn it on and off. Everything else, from sound to color profiles can, and have already for years now, be handled by external devices smarter than you.
If you make this, and you focus on picture quality instead of figuring out ways to confuse and exploit the customer, I promise you, I absolutely promise you, every AV nerd I know will buy one. And they will love it. And they will recommend it, and share it, and buy them for their loved ones. And blog about it. Tweet about it. Podcast, vlog and sing about it.
And you'll disrupt the old model. You will be the company that brings about the next revolution in television. You've been looking to do that for so long haven't you? And while you always secretly knew it wasn't IPTV or 3D that was going to start the next revolution, what you didn't know is how easy it would be to disrupt the current incumbents.
The customer is waiting, cash in hand.
This may or may not be Android, which is kind of the problem. The most likely contenders here (Apple, Google, MS, Sony) have a dog in the race & incumbent problems. They committed to an approach or a technology too early. They have a market (eg itunes), complementary products or ecosystems to protect.
What does TV software really need in order to be significantly better than the average smart TV? A handful of core apps (Youtube, Netflix), some local ???Players (these could be introduced market by market) and some experimental/novelty apps (eg Skype, spotify). That's it. That's a good start. Crappy games and access to 99 upstart content marketplaces is not necessary. An app marketplace could come second.
*Vanilla android is not the answer. If it's going to be android it needs to be android for TV.
What you're describing though is currently what the Apple TV is like. It comes with Netflix, Youtube and a bunch of other apps (sports stuff, a few music services, etc). It's missing an app store - but there's a pretty decent chance that will arrive at some point over the next few years (there are so many apps on there at this point that it's becoming a little cluttered, so I think it's coming sooner rather than later).
Even though Apple has iTunes, their primary business is hardware and they don't seem to have an issue with putting iTunes competitors on there.
Of course, the Apple TV has a long way to go. It's still pretty much a hobby project (although recently it's getting more and more updates).
I wish the YouTube interface was better though, but with the new AirPlay stuff, it's becoming less and less of an issue. Very neat, if you have all the bits for the full "ecosystem" (up until I did, it was a lot more painful and got less use).
Android on the TV is like Windows XP on your phone right now. It's cool that it's possible, but very obviously not what it was intended for. Android for TV (whether or not it is based on Android) needs to be designed for the job.
The Apple TV is problematic in that it can't come bundled with your TV. Part of what I mean by 'Android for X' is that Samsung can put it in their products and build their strategy around it.
That said, a simple clean airmouse is so much nicer than the zillion-button monstrosities of traditional TV remotes.
A good hardware peripheral should be able to provide those services. Just give me an airmouse with a drag-scroll joystick and a keyboard when I need it. The problem is that most hardware vendors trying to hit this market are serious lowest-common-denominator companies - fly-by-night Chinese manufacturers and whatnot. Sony did it too, but they stuck it to the stillborn Google TV OS.
Take it away from the TV division and get somebody who designs controllers to make the remote. Get the Playstation guys on this. A hybrid between the PS3 Move Controller and this thing:
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...
Of course I want a new firmware board for my 5 year old HD TV which sends the wrong resolution data to my pc, has a terrible SD UI, and doesn't decode HD OTA signals, but it's not going to be cheaper than buying a new TV
Edit: You can get big, dumb TVs that look stellar. Look at TVs targeting the commercial space. Of course, you're going to pay for it though.
(In case it wasn't clear... you are not the only market segment. Neither am I.)
This seems like more of an extension of hardware manufacturers still not being good at software. I'd say Samsung's version of Android proves that they still aren't great at it (but are getting better).
Another personal anecdote, my father-in-law, who not 2 years ago was unaware of what Google was or how to use it, ordered a riding mower online for next day delivery. That's a large purchase made all of his life at a B&M which he was fine doing online. If someone reliable besides Lowes'/HD had a better price, they would've made the sale.
That is a profoundly good idea. Let the TV manufacturer bundle all their "smart apps" stuff on USB-powered HDMI stick like a chromecast. Then five years down the line when the manufacturer has completely forgotten that the model even exists you can just spend $100 and get a modern one from some third party.
With HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) they can even integrate controlling the HDMI stick through the TV's remote for a completely seamless experience.
It's probably one of those ideas that is so good no manufacturer will ever do it though and we'll just be stuck with obsolete and forgotten software.
I still don't understand why "AppleTV" isn't just a dock for your phone with an HDMI tail and an IR receiver on the front... Maybe it's old fashioned of me to not use my phone while watching TV.
Chromecast has shown how very little you actually need connected to the TV in order to provide this kind of functionality though.
Personally I'll stick with an external device, as it means there's an endless line of companies waiting to pick up the baton, and if I don't find an off the shelf device, I can set up my own.
There's just no compelling reason to lock myself into whatever the TV manufacturer decides to provide.
What makes the concept sound if the implementation certainly isn't?
> There are TVs with Hulu and Netflix just a few remote presses away - people want that.
Most Blu-ray players, game consoles, DVRs, etc come with Netflix and Hulu too. Why do I want my TV to do it when I have 5 other devices hooked up that can do it with a better UI? People already have these devices, so no, I don't think people want another, shittier, implementation.
> AV nerds are a small market by comparison.
Small, but like every nerd market, very vocal and very influential. Look at the best selling TVs on Amazon, they are all highly recommended in AV circles.
> This seems like more of an extension of hardware manufacturers still not being good at software. I'd say Samsung's version of Android proves that they still aren't great at it (but are getting better).
Agreed.
The rate of change of the "smart" technology is far greater than that of the actual video display. That is, I expect that the TV will continue to work for displaying video for many years, but the cycle time for "smart" services is currently months or very few years.
Thus, to keep current with the ability to display content, I'd need to dump a display system that's perfectly good.
Better to separate the modules. Have a really good display system, and separate, a smart device that handles content. That smart device can be dead-simple to install and to operate, and still do a great job (like Roku).
I plan to keep using my TV for at least 10 years and probably rather longer. There is no chance any of the "smart" BS will still be useful then. (Imagine you had a "smart" TV in 2004 that, say, updated your Myspace page.)
Obviously as far as the manufacturer is concerned, they'd rather I buy a new TV after 4 years so I can get new "smart apps" and yada yada yada, but anyone who does research isn't going to fall for that.
The hardware is there, it can run stuff and show videos just fine, but the manufacturer refuses to update it. It really pisses me off since it's a nice panel with great picture quality.
Remotes like this: http://wardiesworld.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/raspi_samsun...
always remind me of this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happen...
Show me a remote that works better then that one and I can probably tell you why it sucks.
I would like to hear you opinion.
Roku's first remote was very similar but had the same problem - no back button. If you're going to do interactive apps on your TV you need a back button and an exit or "home" button - they're two different things. The Apple remote assumes very limited input almost zero text input so no numbers or extraneous keys like the color keys.
My favorite remote close to the apple one was the Boxee 1 remote (it too needs an explicit back button). But the slim, pared down front side design with the full keyboard on the back was very slick and usable.
http://old-blog.boxee.tv/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Boxee-Bo...
To be fair: UI (virtual and physical) is hard. Thus far, the AppleTV is my favorite but it's a "lesser of two evils" scenario.
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...
It's purely meant as a mouse-and-keyboard thing, and in that vein it has some failures (the mouse-buttons are face-buttons instead of console-style triggers, and the keyboard lacks a way to use the F function keys)... but in general? I used its predecessor (the N9501 instead of N9502) and found the design lovely.
I could navigate my set-top PC easily with the trackball and mouse buttons, and when I needed to do text-entry I could hold it like a thumb keyboard. I even got pretty far in Cipher Prime's Auditorium with the trackball - it was quite pleasant for low-stress mouse-only games (as long as they only need click, not drag). The problem with my old version was that the trackball was not user-servicable (trackballs get dirty, fast) and it wasn't backlit.
The new one uses a touchpad and has backlighting.
A problem I see is that the tasks of set-top-boxes and displays are relatively constrained, so having a reduced input device seems like a good idea. But how to support free-text searching without a full keyboard (on-screen menus are painful) or having to deal with limited battery life due to a touchscreen?
For many consumers, any feature not accessible with a single button won't exist. It will be a major pain point. Having it be accessible as a sequence of actions or through a menu won't work.
Try doing usability testing with a few grumpy 65 year olds or people who have trouble operating a microwave. They are a larger market than you think.
Then those features don't exist, and that's fine. Is our hypothetical Luddite going to be switching audio streams to SAP? Playing with the picture-in-picture feature? Is he going to know what TTX/MIX means? DMA? E.MODE?
No. Undocumented features are also non-existent features. And for most users, the instruction-manual doesn't count.
It's a TV.
Give basic menu-nav buttons - 4 arrows, OK, Back, show/hide menu.
Give the basic TV tuner buttons - the 0-9 buttons, channel up/down, "Guide" menu button. There's the entirety of your TV facility. Guide needs arrow keys, but our main menu nav already provides that. We don't even really need a "Guide" button, "Guide" can be just be the default view of "Menu".
Volume control, input-selector for its functions as a monitor.
That's it. Notice something? None of those require horrifying abbreviations. We already have standard symbols for all of them. No unlabeled colored buttons. Most of those buttons don't even require words because they're so common we have symbols for them. We just covered all of Grandpa's uses - he wants to change channels and change the volume. We're done. Everything else? Your crazy abbreviated buttons are even more user-hostile than the menu, because at least entries in the menu have vowels.
You could easily cut 6 rows off the Samsung I used as an example and Grandpa would still be happy. Happier even because he's no longer confused about all these crazy weird tiny illegible buttons on his remote. You could even make a large-print version for him and it would be smaller than a dinner-plate.
On that note, I somehow recall seeing TVs shipped with 2 remotes - the 'full one' and a simple one like you describe, with the expectation that people will choose which they prefer, and members of the same family might have opposite preferences.
So really, the Apple TV remote isn't that extreme. It's just a remote for an Apple TV set-top box and not a television.
The red button in particular is used in the UK for lots of TV services. It's not unusual to hear the phrase 'push the red button for X' on TV.
X is usually alternative video feeds of live/sporting events, or different sporting commentary
You can also use the red button for other information such as news headlines, the weather, sport scores. Grandpa uses this, youngsters have their phones and the internet
Thats 99% of a remote usage, the rest is handled by any GUI.
They control the screen, the software, and the controller, same as Apple. They're just not as good at it as Apple.
I don't like Apple - I don't like the horrifying complete lock-in of hardware/software/media. But I admit something: Apple wins because they're the best. Period.
I'd never want to be stuck with just an Apple remote.
You only have a few channels you like, and should be able to simply switch between them with a D-pad. But the cable industry's broken business model requires you to subscribe to an order of magnitude more than you want. Clunky set-top box UIs have you constantly paging up and down massive lists. A "favorites" system is nestled deep within some unintuitive menu, and never displays anyway when you go to the channel guide, always requiring more button presses followed by high-latency screen redraws. And thus, you're stuck dialing in a numeric code like it's 1968.
I'm sure you'd be ecstatic to be stuck with an Apple remote, if only the entire rest of the TV experience were up to speed with it.
2) Good God, nobody wants to enter "3-digit codes". Your 100+ channels fit into a regular grid, with, you know, pictures. So I can actually see what's what, without remembering that "124" is "shitty shopping channel #16".
Said grid can be navigated quite quickly with a d-pad. If it was just a regular grid of, say, 12x12 entries, you can reach any entry in 12 clicks. (Assuming your UI does the smart thing and wraps)
3) If you had a better interface, like e.g. categorization, you could do with less than 12 clicks. Optimally utilizing the 4 directions, 4 clicks would do. You'll probably need one or two more, but it's fairly straightforward
4) If the UI designers had paid any attention to decent UIs, they'd be aware of such nifty inventions as "Favorites" and "Recently visited", which means even less key strokes.
5) Can we already ditch the "dedicated remote" nonsense, even the Apple one, and admit pretty much every household has some sort of Wifi enabled touch screen in their home? E.g. a much better device for your UI?
Buttons like that are an artifact of the days when TVs didn't have on-screen UIs. The remote should not be designed for the 1% of users that fiddle with such things.
Do heatmaps and find out which buttons are actually used frequently give those big clear buttons with unabbreviated labels, and move everything else into the menus.
And the menus themselves - you have a whole screenful of space, you can actually describe to the user what each option does in helpful detail.
Shame LG seem intent on ruining it with the spying, I hope they have a change of approach and resolve this.
It's like the remote designer's revenge. "Too many buttons? I'll show you what it's like to not have buttons!" This remote literally has a button on it that brings up an on-screen picture of a remote that you use by swiping around on the trackpad, so you can get at the buttons your remote is missing.
They're obvious only in hindsight.
I guess ultimately, I really don't care how ugly something is if it's at least consistent and informative. However, I know I'm an outlier in this.
Trying to cram everything into one panel has left us with nothing but the controls and very little space for information.
Also, even if you wanted that layout, the alignments are terrible and the use of frames is arbitrary and inconsistent.
I just returned a Nexus 5 because it had poor reception compared to other phones using the same SIM card.
I was going to buy a LG G2 but having just seen how you treat your TV customers as cattle, I won't touch anything from LG for the forseeable future.
In a nutshell, LG, you lose my money.
Regards,
Ex-Customer
To be fair, a lot of that is software, too, nowadays. Upscaling without visible artifacts? Figuring out what the optimal backlighting should be? Adaptive blurring? Motion blur compensation? All done in software.
A large part of the problem, I think, is that tv companies, traditionally, let the hardware engineers who write that software add a menu structure, because they are programmers, and all programming is programming, isn't it? I do think things are a lot better than they were 5 years ago, but could be a lot better still.
No one would argue that signal processing and the stuff traditionally known as "firmware" has a valid purpose. It's the stuff that arises when an executive get a boner for a "product vision" that people don't want or need. It's the kind of trash that looks alluring on a list of bullet points, but gets turned over every 24 months because it's utterly void of any substance, and only got produced at the whims of some empty suit trying to prove his worth.
I also think that t.v. manufacturers _must_ try to improve their offering with features not directly related to image or audio quality; there is no margin in plain television sets and too few get sold (one every 4-5 years per family vs one smartphone every two years or so per person). Problem is not that they try, but that they don't succeed. In that sense, there is an opportunity for someone with an Apple-like approach to enter the market.
Most people care about how big it is and much it cost, hench why LCDs beat out Plasmas.
(I bought her a Roku 3 but it was returned due to hardware errors so she's been using the TV system since)
1. I cannot easily distinguish between SD and HD screens. I would much rather have a faster frame rate or better sound quality or an easier way to legally access international TV channels. Better picture quality? I don't care for that any more.
2. My (non-technical) housemate plans to upgrade his TV to one with built-in software, because he thinks it will be an improvement on the buggy set-top box software and he won't need to worry about cabling and upgrading external devices. He has no interest in HD either, but he is happy to pay for a TV with better picture quality simply because he imagines that paying more for a TV means he'll get better software.
"The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions."
Such a loaf could be given away free if the data collected could be repackaged and access to it sold to the highest bidder (I'm thinking pharma companies might pay).
A (imho insidious) way to get this accepted by the public would be to target humanitarian efforts first. Tracking health and disease in refugee populations is a real problem, so this system could offer tangible benefits. The refugees aren't really in a position to complain about privacy aspects and it'd be unpalatable for anyone to try a cost/benefit analysis when considering immediate survival against future privacy concerns (esp when it's framed from the point of view of saving a child -- as it usually is). Once this is considered 'normal' in such situations, it could be a short hop (or slippery slope?) to the supermarket.
If you think this is ridiculous, please remember that there was once a time when having robots read our email was considered hugely invasive by much of the public (Gmail launch).
Just joking about today. Of course it will become mainstream but by then we shall all be conscious of it.
I hope...
The 'save the children' attitude will kill us all, yes.
Basically, you ingest food and something in it collects data and can show you advertisements (or whatever) based on your eating habits. You wouldn't even have to know you've eaten the stuff (the nano-machines or whatever) but you'd start seeing ads because the nano-machines have attached themselves to your eyes and are creating images for you to see. How do you know what's real, then?
We don't have that technology yet (AFAIK), but this is just one step beyond a few current technologies (Google Glass + nano-machines?) and an extension of the path of privacy invasion via technology we're currently on.
This might just sound like crazy science fiction paranoia but I'm pretty sure we'll see something like this happen in the next 100 years.
By removing the sealed packaging on this loaf of bread, you agree to the following terms and conditions:
-- 10 pages of terms and conditions in tiny print condensed to fit on the packaging of a loaf of bread --
And if LG's argument is that the software that comes with the TV has some sort of licence agreement that customers must accept before using it, that's another whole can of worms.
Please let them try to fight this in a court high enough to set a precedent. Making an example of LG under the various consumer protection laws might be easier than taking on a dedicated software company.
We are well overdue for a heavyweight case in the UK to prove that vendors selling a device for a well understood purpose can't get away with sneaking terms into their legal weasel words about DRM or spyware or introducing security vulnerabilities or rights of physical access for audit purposes or various other abuses that really have nothing to do with what the customer bought the device for.
The problem for LG is: more than 0 people do do that.
Real nice product doesn't advertise such smart shit stuff, and only focus on the feature what you actually need and use. Even such computing features made you happy, they know that's not a feature to be advertised.
Just don't buy any SMART stuff. Whatever they ADVERTISE, they're saying on advertisement are all bullshit.
Only seems to be transmitting back when using the smart tv stuff though. The request params and some of the stuff I can decipher. request? id=<some id> s=220x124 dt=03 did=<device id> pt=04 pv=T-INFOLINK2012-1003 nt=10 coc=<country> lnc=<language> ts=1384856584858 <timestamp> tz=<time zone> scr=1280x720 <screen size> dy=2012 md=12_X10PLUS mf=Samsung HTTP/1.1\\r\\n
Unfortunately for me my cable and internet provider (Bell Canada) has decided to start tracking usage habits to target ads:
http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/bell-to-start-tracking-customers-...
I'd suggest doing a short cover letter, a simple-English write-up, with a detailed technical appendix.
I'd ask if LG are registered to collect data, and if their registration covers this data. And if any of this information leave the EU etc.
Thanks for the write up! It's interesting. I wonder if rooting the telly to replace this functionality is legal? I never know what the laws are about reverse engineering stuff now.
LG is instantly on my shitlist for this and the channel and media data leaks.
When I go into the "Internet" function, it shows me ads at the bottom. Why am I seeing these ads?
For example, in the UK we pay the TV license to BBC to NOT see ads. We are paying for a TV so why am I still seeing ads?
If I was renting a TV at a reduced cost or some type of freemium model then I would expect it, takes the biscuit a little I say.
My Bravia EX has no adverts but I don't entirely trust it.
Of course, the demo mode doesn't have advertising, so there is no way to know about it beforehand.
Potentially relevant link: http://www.samsungadhub.com
I don't want smart features in my TV. I want my TV to show pictures and maybe make sounds from a useful range of input connections, and nothing else.
I can add my own features by connecting different sources to the TV, and so can anyone else who ever bought a FreeView box or PVR or other similar device. And that way, we can also ignore those sources that don't serve our interests, and upgrade or replace the supplementary sources as things like catch-up and on-demand services evolve, without throwing out perfectly good TV hardware.
I get that the TV brands want to jump on the advertising bandwagon, but this is the UK, home of the (commercial-ad-free) BBC. The vendors aren't going to be popular if they try to ram this obvious backward step down our throats, and I suspect they may be surprised by how many of us will vote with our wallets to avoid it. We just need to make sure customers who aren't A/V fanatics or HN-reading geeks are educated about what is going on, so they can vote with their wallets too.
My TV does not even play sound through its speakers anymore since I upgraded to a surround setup. It literally does just display whatever I feed it through its HDMI inputs.
I kinda like it that way. Should the TV break, I can get a new one and won't have to spend hours trying to set everything back up the way it was.
It was an opt out system, every TV got a unique ID, but it was anonymous - Philips didn't knew who you were. If someone watched something more than 15 mins, it was send to the DB and was profiled. After a while, the system learned your preferences - also depending on the watching hour - and started to show, per request, recommandations what to watch - which channel was the most close to your preferences. It worked like a charm.
But indeed, no personal data was collected so I don't really understand the fuss. Same for this case, LG sens anonymous data, and returns best ads for you. A little better than Google, i might say.
Thanks! I always love it when I get the best ads!
Filenames on USB sticks attached to the TV could quite easily include personal data. That and the lack of (working) option to disable the feature entirely.
The spying is done by the people working at LG. The TV is only the technical method used to spy on you and your family.
There is some disconnection within two sentences: If it's not personal to me, how can they return the best ads for me?
But it's interesting and worrying that this problem would not have been found if LG was using SSL.
So you could bypass it easily
Or maybe you can import a certificate somehow.
My name, address, tax number, drivers license number, passport number, etc, etc.
Now they've slurped that off my drive without my permission, and transmitted it in the clear. Can I sue them for "unauthorized access" or identity theft?
What if the file name was some industry secret under NDA or other protection?
(For example Apple_iPhone_7_2015_design_spec.pdf or NSA_POTUS_PHONE_LOGS_2013_TOP_SECRET.csv )
With regard to TOP SECRET info, I think that the person plugging the data in is at fault, if they were under an obligation to keep it protected, and they failed by letting it go to a private server.
Identity information could be a liability for them, I think. By instituting this feature, they open a possibility of collecting private information, which they should have a duty to protect.
Furthermore, there's an issue of going further down the rabbit hole with smart TVs. What about the terms and conditions of use of software that you may never even use that is still collecting data?
I have a LG dumb TV with DLNA and wired connectivity only. LAN only setup does not work. It has to have a full Internet connection.
Any suggestions? I can't seem to find any non-smart TVs that are reasonably current with at least 3 HDMI ports.
Until they get "smart" enough to connect via someone else's WiFi hotspot within range.
If you think this is a joke or some sort of silly conspiracy theory, please consider the scheme BT already operate across the UK where you can piggy back on other people's home broadband to get wireless Internet access. On my fairly typical residential street, I already have several homes within range of this computer that are part of that scheme, which any wireless device in my home could be connecting to without my knowledge or consent, including those with access to my home network or that include equipment like cameras and microphones.
I expect BT could make a tidy profit from making deals with these kinds of companies so they can phone home using their built-in wireless without depending on the customer's own Internet provision, and given their track record, I have no reason to believe they would object to their networks being used for the purposes of intrusive surveillance. I am hoping that laws against these in-home privacy intrusions will arrive before it becomes the norm for consumer products to use the national wireless spynet for this kind of purpose, but given the way the market is going, I am not happy about our prospects on this one.
Might even have some fun with it by sending it lots of channel changes, pen drive details and the rest.
Another question is how to handle https requests?
tinyproxy does what you want.
We are really making it easy for all the companies that do the same that LG does.
Perhaps you would be happier with a script like https://gist.github.com/aarmot/5730468
There's also http://block.si/ cloud service but I haven't tried that.
Pretty sure there's a small dns blocker app for openwrt/pineapple as well, but don't remember the name of it right now.
address=/[banned domain]/0.0.0.0
These is very bad For LG, And Samsung. These wrongful data collection should stop.
My phone is smarter than you.
That notwithstanding, I see boxes like Apple TV and Xbox One becoming the way that people interact with their TVs, making the whole problem somewhat moot anyway.
Naturally they bury this little fact deep in the T&Cs where you won't even get to read it until you get the TV home, and who reads T&Cs? Almost nobody & the LG knows it.
How well do you think this TV would sell if they had to emblazon "This TV will report what you watch to LG so that they can sell that information to anyone" across the front in the store?
Of course, I agree. My point was that since the buyer wants a "smart" tv, they probably mean to connect it to the network. So instead of not configuring the network, blocking the "phone home" ips might be a more realistic (although probably too technical for most) solution.
For me it's only unwanted bloat, like 3D. IOW, I may buy a "smart" TV, but if so it's only for the other features like screen size and quality. Nontechnical people have to be educated that the network features may compromise privacy and LAN security - but AFAIK you can always opt out, as the grandparent points out.
At least I assume it needs a cable or a wifi key - if it actually seeks out wireless and connects without permission, it's lawsuit time.
Usually intentionally impossible to increase sales.
There are also potentially other issues with the UK Data Protection Act, such as if they were to collect any personally identifiable information, which is likely that they will at times do if it snarfs data from attached USB devices at will.
And I'd love to see how they respond if he serves them with a Subject Access Notice (in the EU we have a legal right to see what data companies hold on us in most cases).
Is it possible that they do indeed collect it, but are faking 404?
Step now would be implement technology into the TVs. check
Step two would be to accept payload, however perhaps they are in waiting period to see if news like this one will come up, and then how much damage, if any, it will create. If none, then Step two: check.
What's step 3? Agreement with RIAA or Holywood to sell this data? It could help in litigation by giving more ammunition to plantiff. What is LG TOS of the TV says? Mentions anything about it?
Thank you for the post BTW. While they are tens of TV brands, its good to know which one to stay away from.
Above all remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.": 1) LG's response from their CS department was composed by a minimum wage agent who got a response from their mid-level supervisor who enquired with someone in product management who badly translated that from some Korean discussions. 2) Most Koreans don't care about content piracy, it is rife in Korea, especially with their excellent bandwidth. 3) Most of these policies were probably written by someone more interested in making the best product for the least money and probably not someone from the west.
I would hope that LG might pick up on this and make a better statement, but it won't change their attitude.
Finally, personally as someone who makes a lot of set-top boxes I would happily see more dumb TVs, but the business of TVs is loss making. None of the big brands has made money in the TV business in ages, most people do it either for turn-over or brand recognition. Making basic large "monitors" is a difficult business to make a profit in because you are selling something very basic in a mature market.
What subsidized product? I just paid hundreds to thousands for something you advertise as a smart tv.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/02/cognitive_lands_lg_a...
Some alternative OS they can install that doesn't suck.