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User Alleges LG TVs Phone Home With Your Viewing Habits
psychonaut writes "Blogger DoctorBeet discovered that his new LG television was surreptitiously sending information about his TV viewing habits, as well as the names of the files he watched on removable media, to LG's servers. There is an undocumented setting in the TV configuration which supposedly disables this behaviour, but an inspection of the network traffic between the TV and the Internet showed that the TV continues to send the data whether or not the setting is disabled. DoctorBeet contacted LG, but they shrugged the matter off, saying that it's a matter between him and the retailer he bought the TV from."
Don't you get the sarcasm?
LG doesn't take responsibility for their products.
Contact the privacy commissioner.
Whatever your DLNA-client — whether it is the TV itself (LG have this capability), or some 3rd-party box — it can do the same sort of "calling home" reporting what you are watching.
Worse! Whereas the documented spying reports only the currently-watched file and is limited to the listing of the currently-inserted USB-stick, with DLNA your entire collection can be POSTed facilitating not only research into your watching habits, but also aiding investigations of copyright-violations, for example.
The only way to be sure is to disable Internet-access — or only allow it to the sites you trust (for whatever reason). (Like YouTube or Netflix — it is unlikely (though entirely possible) for them to do the same kind of snooping into your media-collection.) Unfortunately, doing that will also disable firmware updates...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Actually, in the US it's a bit tricky for a Cable TV company to sell/give/distribute your viewing data. They can use it internally, but there's a specific law that prohibits disclosure of that data. The Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984 prohibits cable TV providers from disclosing personally identifiable information, and allows users to view and verify their information. This is somewhat unique. No such rules apply to other communications means. For instance if Verizon wants to publish my browsing habits, as gleaned from watching the packets go by, there's not a lot I can do, from a non-contract law standpoint.
Every public opinion poll says just the opposite. Too many to cite, but here's one: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-23/politics/40862490_1_edward-snowden-nsa-programs-privacy It's easier to blame the victims than the people in power.
It doesn't transmit the currently watched filename, it dumps the folder contents asynchronously when accessing the Smart functions. And not all the time, it's possibly newly added files.
I am the blogger who found this, let me know if you would like verification.
So how can we prevent this from happening? I haven't read the T&Cs but one thing I am sure about is that I own my router and have absolute jurisdiction of any traffic that I allow to pass, so I have compiled an initial list of internet domains that you can block to stop spying and advertising on TVs that we, as customers have actually paid for.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I tried that but you need a valid authentication ID and session ID plus all those X-Device attributes otherwise it returns an error from the JBoss app server.