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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.
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.