HTG 553: TV Privacy - How Much Data Collection Is Too Much?

In early September, a YouTube channel called GamersNexus posted a long investigation into exactly what LG TVs capture in terms of data regarding what you watch and even more, and it turns out to be a lot.

Um, I'm gonna be posting a lot of links to s- uh, websites on this show in the show notes, um, so that you can go check it out for yourself.

Uh, the original, uh, YouTube, uh, video that G- GamersNexus came out with is over two hours long, um, but it's a very in-depth investigation into what LG TVs, specifically the LG G5 OLED, um, what kind of data they gather, and, uh, it's, it's kind of disturbing.

According to their testing, the LG G5 captures and stores anything and everything it picks up with its onboard microphone, even ambient conversations.

So even when you're not saying to the T- giving voice commands to the TV, it's recording things that you might ev- be talking about in earshot, and that's even if you're not connected to the home network, the TV is not connected to the home network, even if it's turned off.

It also happens to identify all the other devices on your home network.

So this is kind of disturbing.

Of course, it also captures all the content that you're watching, the audio and video, whether it's from onboard streaming apps in the TV or anything coming into the TV via HDMI.

Actually, it samples that content once every second or two or three or whatever, um, and takes that data and creates what they call a fingerprint of what you're watching.

Now, if your TV is connected to your home network, uh, it's then connected to the internet, and the TV sends all this data back to LG and its partners.

The information is encrypted, so even computer experts might not always be able to decode exactly what data are being sent.

Now, [coughs] the umbrella term for this activity, process is called automatic content recognition, or ACR.

Ostensibly, ACR is used to recommend content similar to what you've been watching.

Um, so that seems innocuous enough, but much more important to the manufacturer, it helps them target advertising based on what you watch, and this is where they make their money.

You probably know that TVs sell very inexpensively these days.

They operate on what's called a razor-thin margin, and they might even lose money.

In some cases, they do, um, and that's why they're so inexpensive these days.

But the manufacturers more than make up for that by selling the data they collect from you and from millions other, of others to advertisers.

Uh, the GamersNexus report cited something like 216 million TVs [laughs] uh, that are doing this.

Now, in response to the GamersNexus report, LG vigorously denied that that's what they're doing, um, but the GamersNexus report clearly demonstrated what, [laughs] what they're doing.

They showed evidence, and, uh, I'm gonna post a link to the video that is GamersNexus response to the LG denial.

And if you watch that, you'll notice that GamersNexus plays clips of LG officials saying that they, quote, "own the glass" of the TVs that you buy.

So I guess they think you don't own that glass.

They do, and they can do whatever they want with it.

Oh, man