I think the author took the wrong message from the video.
His arguments are all
- yes everyone does this not just lg; :)
- yes it can be used to track the user; but unless you literally go into lg ads hq, you can’t say they don’t
- they rooted to trigger this; well the os and system apps don’t need root, we need it to observe.
If the author is here please consider these as the reasons to why an LG customer would be mad.
- They did not knew LG has an ads subsidiary, whose CEOs and executives constantly go on investor meetings claiming “they own the glass”, “they own the living room”, “they own the network and devices” in the “lg household”
- if the above was said by lg tv division it would have still stung less. This was said by an ad company they didn’t knew existed nor did they agree to be associated with when they bought a home appliance.
Stop focusing on the technical details, look at the larger picture.
Yes, as the owner of an LG OLED, I paid a premium for a good quality panel, and expect it to be mine.
Also, I anticipated ads on a smart TV (unfortunately it's inevitable), but (wrongly) assumed that such invasive tracking and "we own the glass" would be a bar too low even for the budget manufacturers.
I agree with the author, the point is that the way the video and the overall research was done, the entire message was diluted too much.
There is substance in what they did. But they should have worked with an actual journalist to frame this properly and create pressure on the overarching topics.
If a TV company (LG or ANY of the others who have Ad-subsidiaries) needs to respond to this video, they can easily reframe the whole topic.
The most blatant example is that they demonstrate in the video that this TV, which has a built-in microphone for voice-control, that can be switched off with a mechanical switch:
1. Will record your voice when you ask it to transcribe your input to a textbox
2. Will process your voice to create this text it shows, as visible on the logs of the rooted OS
3. Will SHOW you that it's transcribing your input on the screen.
This is weakening the whole story.
--
In HN-terms: It's a constant-power, constantly-connected IoT-device with lots of sensors and huge compute-power, located in the center of your home.
There are big topics around this that deserve a huge spotlight, which apply to ALL TV manufacturers:
a. What data is actually being collected about the user, and what is done with this data?
b. How well is security handled on the TV to ensure no malicious usage?
Repeatedly jumping to the conclusion during the video that LG specifically is collecting ALL this local data to spy on you, without clear evidence, this just gives LG an easy way to respond and every other vendor enough room to distance themselves from the whole story.
> What data is actually being collected about the user, and what is done with this data?
This question implies that the answer could be something other than the maximum amount of data collection and monetization of that data they can get away with.
If that statement gives you pause please spend even a short amount of time reading about ad networks, data brokers, and corporate surveillance.
Yeah, I wouldn't vouch for a US court, but lucky me I'm in the EU, where the answer "the maximum amount of data collection and monetization of that data they can get away with" is not compliant to the requirements of GDPR.
So even IF that would be a sufficient answer in a court of US, it would not be sufficient in a court of an EU country.
--> Hence my point on how the overall message was diluted too much.
See, you may look at all this as "nothing can be done anyway, so let's bunch it all together and rant about it as emotionally as possible". But I look at it as "this is all potential evidence that a law was either already broken or needs to have a loophole closed"
But you won't get any of this done by spraying all over how normal this is and how everyone does it anyway. You get this done with a precise shot at ONE of them, concise enough to pin them down while aiming at the next one.
LG's terms of service essentially state that they will record any voice commands and store them for 6 months. They explicitly say they may store them in Korea. https://us.lgappstv.com/main/terms
Actually I think everything you're suggesting is unclear, LG explicitly say they do these things in their ToS. I skimmed their privacy policy, and I'm pretty sure it essentially says they collect all this information and use it for targeted advertising.
I was also a bit disappointed with the video. I don't usually watch the channel, but the previous video on LG with the McAfee thing was good. This one, well it has important points and exposes some very valid concerns. However I mostly agree with the linked article, it does not properly spell out what they actually can prove, and what's just conjecture. The video gets lauded as investigative journalism, I think the technical details are important to get right and make clear to non-tech people. A normal consumer would have no idea how to really judge the danger to their privacy after watching this, they'd come away thinking that for sure someone can listen in on their living room.
It's either a deliberately contrary or the author has other motives (which may sound ridiculous, but we know that bad actors have been paying people for bad takes for years - Malcolm Gladwell for instance being paid by oil and gas).
> If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security.
> If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.
There are ways to remotely jailbreak LG webOS TVs without user interaction, using the same (or similar) vulnerabilities you use to root your own TV voluntarily.
The main reason tools like https://rootmy.tv are prefixed with disclaimers and require user interaction is because we're being courteous, not because they're technically necessary. (source: I own the rootmy.tv domain)
Most of what I’m reading on rootmy.tv says the vulnerability it exploits has been fixed. So, if one were to keep software up to date on their TV, there is an improbably small chance it can actually be remotely jailbroken — am I reading this right?
The specific vulnerabilities exploited by rootmy.tv have been patched, yes, but there are plenty more unpatched vulnerabilities remaining. There are also more up-to-date rooting tools beyond rootmy.tv.
The security posture of webOS is absolutely terrible, at least, it is in the way LG deploys it.
Yup. I'm sitting on one that doesn't even require an internet connection, only RF down the TV antenna input. I'm waiting for my model to go EOL before I release it.
Holy shit. RF to zero-click exploit is a new one. I guess digital-everything wasn't always a good idea, this probably wouldn't ever have been a problem with analogue antennas and CRTs.
Teletext was available in analogue times. So I could well imagine there to be a possible avenue of exploits with it too. Would take a bit of time, but I see no reason why wouldn't some data result in a incorrect handling.
Exploiting what? There wasn’t any software hierarchy for Teletext to escape from in analogy TVs. If you found a bug in the Teletext chip you couldn’t then go on to do anything to the TV set aside print different data to the screen. And since you’re already tuned into that radio frequency and controlling the data sent on it, you already have control of what’s sent to the TV screen already anyway so who cares?
As an aside, I once interviewed one of the guys who wrote Teletext processors for analog TVs. He was a very interesting individual.
> Yup. I'm sitting on one that doesn't even require an internet connection, only RF down the TV antenna input. I'm waiting for my model to go EOL before I release it.
So no responsible disclosure, I see.
Not knowing any more details, it still sounds like you'd still need the user to tune to the actual frequency on the correct receiver (to cause some buffer overflow?). But then still there's no internet to do anything. So you'd need some very specific f/up exploit to then change local settings on the device I imagine.
Either way, would be a great opportunity to demonstrate this in a video, now that there's attention on the topic, to further amplify the pressure on LG's "terrible security posture" as you say.
If the manufacturers responsibly included a responsible way to install custom software/firmware, perhaps people would feel more inclined to help them. Their current attitude buys them very little goodwill.
If I, a corporation, declare that I only accept security reports carved on clay tablets in ancient greek and hand-delivered to my office in Timbuktu during a total solar eclipse - does that stop responsible security researchers from disclosing their findings publicly?
Of course not.
If the guy sends a clear message to the best public contact address he can find with 15 minutes of searching; and gives them 30 days to patch before publicly disclosing the bug; then he's performed responsible disclosure.
The vendor's corporate policies and release cycles and contact addresses and triage procedures are their problem.
Not disclosing a vulnerability you found to the manufacturer (while the product can still hopefully be patched) is “not responsible”. I think that’s what the person is trying to say.
It seems that some people do not appreciate the amount of labour that can be required to turn knowledge of a vulnerability into an actionable bug report. (Before someone says "ask an LLM to do it", LG has that option available to them, too)
It is certainly not work that I would do to benefit a many-billion dollar company, for ~free. I may do it to benefit device owners such as myself, instead.
LG is solely responsible for the security of the products that they choose to sell.
Responsible disclosure makes sense when the user and the manufacturer have the same goal of the product being secure. Jailbreaking is a case where the user and the manufacturer have opposing goals: the user wants to be in charge their hardware, the manufacturer wants to prevent the user from being in charge of their own hardware. Responsible disclosure doesn't make sense, the manufacturer would just patch the vulnerability before users could use it.
If manufacturers had a sanctioned way for the user to get root access to their own hardware, responsible disclosure would've made sense, but as it is, vulnerabilities are a useful tool for the owner of the device.
Yet here we are, in this thread, discussing why LG is spying on us.
While some stuff are legit issues such as ADR, people now think they are wire-tapping. Because somebody used a rooted device to show-case recording silently through their device.
Can you blame corporations having this control-freak nature when shit like this happens?
It's stuff like this that likely pushes corporations now to invest more into device security, and locking down their stuff more.
Good for security and the corporation.
Maybe mid-term good for you consumer, because they might get more cautious with tracking stuff.
But long-term bad for you consumer, too, because they will make sure to lock down their devices better.
This would be one way to interpret it. Another way would be: "If the model is EOL, the potential attack surface gets lower, because you cannot buy it any longer and the amount of devices in use will reduce over time."
On a different note: Are you, in any way, affiliated with LG? You read to me as someone who is "unhappy" with the findings.
The attack-surface doesn't get lower, it just doesn't continue to increase UNLESS the same vulnerability is not carried over to other products.
The attack-surface only gets lower when the TV is no longer in use and is disposed. That doesn't happen at EOL, customers don't suddenly throw away their TVs after 2 years.
I'm happy with the findings and hope that it gains momentum, but unhappy with the dilution of the matter with speculation, assumptions and sensationalism, because it allows the vendor to wiggle out of it and wait for attention to wind down.
I would prefer a clear spotlight to be shined on #1 the ad-networks business model of TV-manufacturers and #2 the security of their (very powerful) products.
If the process results in regulation which also requires the TV manufacturer to offer root-access to the consumer to verify and control its operations, I would be overjoyed.
But this is unfortunately not a subject of the current narrative at all, it will actually result in the opposite (more effort to lock-down the OS to prevent future sensationalism reporting)
I've never used a TV that way, that's the job of whatever is connected to the TV. But if you do use your TV like that, didn't those things work when you got it? Why do you need software updates?
I think you're being deliberately obtuse. You would update software on a TV for all the same reasons you update software on any other device: improved performance, better compatibly, new features, etc
No. My computer is a tool I actively use. The TV is an almost entirely passive consumption device. Was performance not good enough when it was new? If it wasn't, will the new software versions truly buck the trend we've seen in software for the past few decades and improve performance? What new features are necessary? Video playback has been a solved problem for the past few decades.
> So, if one were to keep software up to date on their TV,
I presume LG is like most vendors and stops issuing updates for older models after a while. It's pretty hard to keep software up to date when the vendor stops issuing updates.
These vulnerabilities only get fixed because they're used by public rooting tools. If blackhat hackers found them instead, kept quiet about them and used them carefully, they'd never be fixed.
I read the documentation and it appears that the only reason it doesn't still work is because development was "postponed for a few months" back in 2021. Presumably there is still the possibility of exploits on the latest versions, it's just nobody's bothered yet.
Thanks for the write-up, it reflects my own impression of the video.
The video is quite a mixed set of topics mangled together, which is a pity because IMO a cleaner separation would be more beneficial to get the point across.
They should have decided to set the focus on a specific area and then present every finding around that, i.e.:
1. The Ad data-collecting platform TV-manufacturers are operating, what data they collect and how they use it.
2. The vulnerabilities of the OS in a SmartTV, and the potential issues to exploit them for malicious purposes.
3. The general behavior of the device when connected to your network, with features like voice control, App control, Smart Home etc. enabled, and how it may expose information about yourself.
All the points and scenarios in the video might be valid, but they jump between those scopes and imply that its all the same, weakening the whole investigation.
If I'm LG and forced to respond to this, I can easily focus on dissecting the voice-input topic as a mere demonstration of the feature and how rooting the TV beforehand just showed the local process of handling it, steering the narrative away from the (IMO) much more important topics...
Yeah if GN wants to keep my attention on this topic they need to edit out all the stuff about normal Wi-Fi stack behaviors and normal local device discovery behaviors. They didn't need to pad their feature-length video with these non-issues.
GN has sadly been trending towards overly long, rambly clickbait videos in recent years, in line with the rest of Youtube. Most of their videos could easily convey the same information with a third of the length.
It's unfortunate, because they're one of the few voices speaking out about issues like this.
And how they asked the device for voice-input for a websearch via the UI, and the device proceeded to perform voice transcription, filling the searchbox with everything that was said...
I know people here do not want to hear it, but it is a very two-sided sword.
Of course root allows you to tinker with your device and make it run what you want, but:
- Rooted devices make devices unpredictable. As shown in the video: How do you trust that your hotel/AirBnB is not using root on _their_ TV to use its microphone to spy on you? Or actually records your video output (instead of "just" ACRing it)?
- Re-selling: How do you know that TV you bought is untampered? How do you know it does not have software with malware installed that steals your credentials?
With an on premise device, the game is already lost. They may plant a separate mic device inside the TV, or elsewhere. Rooted TV doesn't really impact BnB security model.
> How do you know that TV you bought is untampered?
Many rooted devices display during boot a warning that they have been rooted. This is a problem that has been solved for more than a decade, but manufacturers pretend not to know the solution, because they are actively hostile to user freedom.
> How do you trust that your hotel/AirBnB is not using root on _their_ TV to use its microphone to spy on you? Or actually records your video output (instead of "just" ACRing it)?
Let's pretend there aren't plenty other ways they could spy on you. If it's bad if a hotel does it, why is it okay if LG does it? Do you honestly trust LG, and the thousands of "partners" that they sell your data to, and every government whose warrants they have to honor?
Your argument reduces to "if the warden lets us out of our jail cells, who will make sure we behave?"
> Many rooted devices display during boot a warning that they have been rooted.
Usually, this happens after a bootloader unlock because then verified boot is disabled. You can still have a rooted device and not break verified, resulting in no warning. See: jailbroken iPhones.
I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Just have to find an exploit that works with verified / attested boot.
And device manufactures are getting more and more restrictive here, too.
Why do you think that is?
> Let's pretend there aren't plenty other ways they could spy on you.
Sure, of course there are other ways to spy on people.
But as we see here: If the device itself does it, then we like to blame LG.
If they used an exploit to do that, then we blame LG's shitty security.
If a hotel owner installed a microphone inside one or their specific TVs, then we blame the hotel owner at least - not LG.
> If it's bad if a hotel does it, why is it okay if LG does it?
It doesn't seem like it is okay. We are discussing this right here.
> Do you honestly trust LG, and the thousands of "partners" that they sell your data to, and every government whose warrants they have to honor?
Do I trust LG more than a shady hotel / BnB owner or eBay seller? Yes.
Do I trust them fully? No.
It's not fully binary, I'd say.
> Your argument reduces to "if the warden lets us out of our jail cells, who will make sure we behave?"
I am just trying to say, it's really not that binary.
You can extend that to other places whenever attestation is involved.
Do I like Linux and open platforms? Sure! Tampering is fun!
Do I hate people using open platforms to scrape my websites and constantly cause load, steal my content and use that for AI training? Also, yes.
But how can I fight that? We run into CAPTCHAs, Cloudflare, Anubis and co.
Now that issue is reduced, but the openness is also gone.
And you always see in tech spaces we rather want "dumb" devices rather than smart devices, because we cannot trust them.
Attestation buys you more trust, but at the cost of openness.
Honestly in a lot of cases people here are too ideologically blinded to see the logic that you’re laying out. It’s the same mental gymnastics that let many here praise something like GrapheneOS yet turn around and screech over it not allowing root which is nearly central to its entire security architecture.
But in this case… I don’t know. The OEM is so actively hostile you might be better off just taking the risk with root if you must purchase it at all (and physically removing the radio/microphone hardware not being an option).
True, but rooting the device de-facto means breaking the trust-chain of the OS.
The inevitable outcome of this video is that TV vendors are pushed to harden the security and preserve the trust-chain, because part of the (valid) claim is that nefarious actors may break the security to use the device for spying on you.
With support from an actual journalist, it could be reframed to also emphasize the importance of controlled root-access to monitor and control the devices behavior.
But none of this was done unfortunately, and if I'm LG I don't want to see another video where someone reframes user-initiated voice-input for a web-search as spying initiative by showing some device-logs of the transcription process in parallel...
This reads like a PR crisis management firm planted article. it probably isn't, but it reads like one. It muddies the waters with vague implications and suggests we cannot infer anything from encrypted packets. If your screen is showing content sourced over HDMI and the packets are heading to the ACR endpoint, I think it's safe to infer HDMI is being ACR'd.
> If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.
Do you actually want a channel with 2.66 million subscribers to show how to get remote access to TVs used by millions of people? :-P
They rooted the TV to study it. They're not saying you're in sudden danger of attackers rooting your TV and running commands over SSH. They're saying there's evidence that certain data is collected when you wouldn't want it to be, and there are any number of potential vulnerabilities that could provide hackers access, on top of LG potentially having access as well which you also probably wouldn't want.
They still run the audio recording manually through SSH and then claim that your TV is spying on your private conversations "silently".
Otherwise, they start a voice command service (clearly displayed on the screen) and then say your TV is recording on your conversation. Like duh, of course my TV starts recording voice when I use voice commands.
And of course you have to trust LG with their TV and (not) having access. That same logic applies to every different company.
Maintaining enemy lists like the one of Drew linked there has been illegal in Germany since 2021 as part of the government's (very necessary!) efforts against hate crimes and right-wing extremism.
Or at least that's my understanding of the law there. Maybe it's exempt based on technicalities.
In any case, I can in many cases emotionally relate to why he is doing that, but.. oof.
> Now, what he’s showing can be pretty scary. I wouldn’t want any attacker to be able to record me without knowing. But it’s important to remember the context here: earlier in the video, Wendell rooted the TV. He has full access to everything on it. To run those commands and programs, he had to log into WebOS via SSH and run them on the device. He didn't show remoting calling those commands, nor was this done on an unmodified device.
> If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security. If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.
What is this authors point?
LG doesn’t need a root exploit to get this info because they made the fucking thing.
I read the article and then grepped for “Texas” to see if I missed it. The author never mentions the fact that this data collection was only found out initially because of a Texas government lawsuit that LG settled on by agreeing to give “informed consent” to users about data collection and then the warnings started popping up in unexpected places.
Is the author arguing that jailbreaking your device to find out what the manufacturer can do to gather data on you is dangerous because I don’t know, questioning your corporate overlords is bad or something?
Some attacks shown on the video (like the "silent" voice recording) are initiated by the people in the video manually running those commands via SSH.
This is the major issue with this video:
It mixes stuff done by LG (ACR) with stuff done via rooting (audio recording). And now people think LG is 24/7 recording your conversations and uploading them somewhere. This has not been proven.
1. Ad hominem.
2. No, LG is not perfect here and their TVs are bloated as fuck and they do questionable things privacy-wise. However, that still does not mean that they listen on every conversation, as shown in the video.
That nuance is important if you value good journalism.
Otherwise if we're just our here throwing random allegations because "corp bad", might as well say LG 's TVs are turning the frickin' frogs gay.
It's not just questionable things, its using dark patterns to do things that wouldn't stand up in court because they definitely illegal in places with data protection laws.
Sorry but such contrary takes in the face of this sort of evidence are either contrary for the sake of it or paid astroturfing.
Anyone who uses GenAI for content creation, isn't worth my time. My rationale is simple: If I wanted to, I could have asked "AI" to generate that content for me, when I am spending my time consuming your content, I expect to get something unique.
His arguments are all
- yes everyone does this not just lg; :)
- yes it can be used to track the user; but unless you literally go into lg ads hq, you can’t say they don’t
- they rooted to trigger this; well the os and system apps don’t need root, we need it to observe.
If the author is here please consider these as the reasons to why an LG customer would be mad.
- They did not knew LG has an ads subsidiary, whose CEOs and executives constantly go on investor meetings claiming “they own the glass”, “they own the living room”, “they own the network and devices” in the “lg household”
- if the above was said by lg tv division it would have still stung less. This was said by an ad company they didn’t knew existed nor did they agree to be associated with when they bought a home appliance.
Stop focusing on the technical details, look at the larger picture.
Also, I anticipated ads on a smart TV (unfortunately it's inevitable), but (wrongly) assumed that such invasive tracking and "we own the glass" would be a bar too low even for the budget manufacturers.
I'm never buying any LG product ever again.
There is substance in what they did. But they should have worked with an actual journalist to frame this properly and create pressure on the overarching topics.
If a TV company (LG or ANY of the others who have Ad-subsidiaries) needs to respond to this video, they can easily reframe the whole topic.
The most blatant example is that they demonstrate in the video that this TV, which has a built-in microphone for voice-control, that can be switched off with a mechanical switch:
1. Will record your voice when you ask it to transcribe your input to a textbox
2. Will process your voice to create this text it shows, as visible on the logs of the rooted OS
3. Will SHOW you that it's transcribing your input on the screen.
This is weakening the whole story.
--
In HN-terms: It's a constant-power, constantly-connected IoT-device with lots of sensors and huge compute-power, located in the center of your home.
There are big topics around this that deserve a huge spotlight, which apply to ALL TV manufacturers:
a. What data is actually being collected about the user, and what is done with this data?
b. How well is security handled on the TV to ensure no malicious usage?
Repeatedly jumping to the conclusion during the video that LG specifically is collecting ALL this local data to spy on you, without clear evidence, this just gives LG an easy way to respond and every other vendor enough room to distance themselves from the whole story.
This question implies that the answer could be something other than the maximum amount of data collection and monetization of that data they can get away with.
If that statement gives you pause please spend even a short amount of time reading about ad networks, data brokers, and corporate surveillance.
So even IF that would be a sufficient answer in a court of US, it would not be sufficient in a court of an EU country.
--> Hence my point on how the overall message was diluted too much.
See, you may look at all this as "nothing can be done anyway, so let's bunch it all together and rant about it as emotionally as possible". But I look at it as "this is all potential evidence that a law was either already broken or needs to have a loophole closed"
But you won't get any of this done by spraying all over how normal this is and how everyone does it anyway. You get this done with a precise shot at ONE of them, concise enough to pin them down while aiming at the next one.
Actually I think everything you're suggesting is unclear, LG explicitly say they do these things in their ToS. I skimmed their privacy policy, and I'm pretty sure it essentially says they collect all this information and use it for targeted advertising.
So there's the angle that US is lacking the proper regulation, and the angle that LG may have violated its ToS in the EU.
But neither of this is going to get pinned down if everything is bunched together without focus and clear evidence...
It's either a deliberately contrary or the author has other motives (which may sound ridiculous, but we know that bad actors have been paying people for bad takes for years - Malcolm Gladwell for instance being paid by oil and gas).
> If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.
There are ways to remotely jailbreak LG webOS TVs without user interaction, using the same (or similar) vulnerabilities you use to root your own TV voluntarily.
The main reason tools like https://rootmy.tv are prefixed with disclaimers and require user interaction is because we're being courteous, not because they're technically necessary. (source: I own the rootmy.tv domain)
The security posture of webOS is absolutely terrible, at least, it is in the way LG deploys it.
But vulnerabilities that can be remotely exploited without user interaction (CVSS grade 9-10)?
Holy shit. RF to zero-click exploit is a new one. I guess digital-everything wasn't always a good idea, this probably wouldn't ever have been a problem with analogue antennas and CRTs.
What are the people at LG even doing?
As an aside, I once interviewed one of the guys who wrote Teletext processors for analog TVs. He was a very interesting individual.
So no responsible disclosure, I see.
Not knowing any more details, it still sounds like you'd still need the user to tune to the actual frequency on the correct receiver (to cause some buffer overflow?). But then still there's no internet to do anything. So you'd need some very specific f/up exploit to then change local settings on the device I imagine.
Either way, would be a great opportunity to demonstrate this in a video, now that there's attention on the topic, to further amplify the pressure on LG's "terrible security posture" as you say.
If the manufacturers responsibly included a responsible way to install custom software/firmware, perhaps people would feel more inclined to help them. Their current attitude buys them very little goodwill.
If I, a corporation, declare that I only accept security reports carved on clay tablets in ancient greek and hand-delivered to my office in Timbuktu during a total solar eclipse - does that stop responsible security researchers from disclosing their findings publicly?
Of course not.
If the guy sends a clear message to the best public contact address he can find with 15 minutes of searching; and gives them 30 days to patch before publicly disclosing the bug; then he's performed responsible disclosure.
The vendor's corporate policies and release cycles and contact addresses and triage procedures are their problem.
Huh?
It is certainly not work that I would do to benefit a many-billion dollar company, for ~free. I may do it to benefit device owners such as myself, instead.
LG is solely responsible for the security of the products that they choose to sell.
I read this as "Wait until the model is EOL, hoping it won't be disclosed and fixed until then and also not fixed afterwards"
Is this not what you meant to say?
If manufacturers had a sanctioned way for the user to get root access to their own hardware, responsible disclosure would've made sense, but as it is, vulnerabilities are a useful tool for the owner of the device.
The video draws exactly that picture, a nefarious actor, remotely taking control over my TV and recording Audio from it
While some stuff are legit issues such as ADR, people now think they are wire-tapping. Because somebody used a rooted device to show-case recording silently through their device.
Can you blame corporations having this control-freak nature when shit like this happens?
It's stuff like this that likely pushes corporations now to invest more into device security, and locking down their stuff more.
Good for security and the corporation.
Maybe mid-term good for you consumer, because they might get more cautious with tracking stuff.
But long-term bad for you consumer, too, because they will make sure to lock down their devices better.
On a different note: Are you, in any way, affiliated with LG? You read to me as someone who is "unhappy" with the findings.
The attack-surface only gets lower when the TV is no longer in use and is disposed. That doesn't happen at EOL, customers don't suddenly throw away their TVs after 2 years.
I'm happy with the findings and hope that it gains momentum, but unhappy with the dilution of the matter with speculation, assumptions and sensationalism, because it allows the vendor to wiggle out of it and wait for attention to wind down.
I would prefer a clear spotlight to be shined on #1 the ad-networks business model of TV-manufacturers and #2 the security of their (very powerful) products.
If the process results in regulation which also requires the TV manufacturer to offer root-access to the consumer to verify and control its operations, I would be overjoyed.
But this is unfortunately not a subject of the current narrative at all, it will actually result in the opposite (more effort to lock-down the OS to prevent future sensationalism reporting)
I presume LG is like most vendors and stops issuing updates for older models after a while. It's pretty hard to keep software up to date when the vendor stops issuing updates.
The video is quite a mixed set of topics mangled together, which is a pity because IMO a cleaner separation would be more beneficial to get the point across.
They should have decided to set the focus on a specific area and then present every finding around that, i.e.:
1. The Ad data-collecting platform TV-manufacturers are operating, what data they collect and how they use it.
2. The vulnerabilities of the OS in a SmartTV, and the potential issues to exploit them for malicious purposes.
3. The general behavior of the device when connected to your network, with features like voice control, App control, Smart Home etc. enabled, and how it may expose information about yourself.
All the points and scenarios in the video might be valid, but they jump between those scopes and imply that its all the same, weakening the whole investigation.
If I'm LG and forced to respond to this, I can easily focus on dissecting the voice-input topic as a mere demonstration of the feature and how rooting the TV beforehand just showed the local process of handling it, steering the narrative away from the (IMO) much more important topics...
It's unfortunate, because they're one of the few voices speaking out about issues like this.
Wow. Please stop spreading things like this.
Not having root means not owning a device you paid for and have in your home.
Of course root allows you to tinker with your device and make it run what you want, but:
- Rooted devices make devices unpredictable. As shown in the video: How do you trust that your hotel/AirBnB is not using root on _their_ TV to use its microphone to spy on you? Or actually records your video output (instead of "just" ACRing it)?
- Re-selling: How do you know that TV you bought is untampered? How do you know it does not have software with malware installed that steals your credentials?
Many rooted devices display during boot a warning that they have been rooted. This is a problem that has been solved for more than a decade, but manufacturers pretend not to know the solution, because they are actively hostile to user freedom.
> How do you trust that your hotel/AirBnB is not using root on _their_ TV to use its microphone to spy on you? Or actually records your video output (instead of "just" ACRing it)?
Let's pretend there aren't plenty other ways they could spy on you. If it's bad if a hotel does it, why is it okay if LG does it? Do you honestly trust LG, and the thousands of "partners" that they sell your data to, and every government whose warrants they have to honor?
Your argument reduces to "if the warden lets us out of our jail cells, who will make sure we behave?"
Usually, this happens after a bootloader unlock because then verified boot is disabled. You can still have a rooted device and not break verified, resulting in no warning. See: jailbroken iPhones.
I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Just have to find an exploit that works with verified / attested boot.
And device manufactures are getting more and more restrictive here, too. Why do you think that is?
> Let's pretend there aren't plenty other ways they could spy on you.
Sure, of course there are other ways to spy on people. But as we see here: If the device itself does it, then we like to blame LG. If they used an exploit to do that, then we blame LG's shitty security.
If a hotel owner installed a microphone inside one or their specific TVs, then we blame the hotel owner at least - not LG.
> If it's bad if a hotel does it, why is it okay if LG does it?
It doesn't seem like it is okay. We are discussing this right here.
> Do you honestly trust LG, and the thousands of "partners" that they sell your data to, and every government whose warrants they have to honor?
Do I trust LG more than a shady hotel / BnB owner or eBay seller? Yes. Do I trust them fully? No. It's not fully binary, I'd say.
> Your argument reduces to "if the warden lets us out of our jail cells, who will make sure we behave?"
I am just trying to say, it's really not that binary. You can extend that to other places whenever attestation is involved.
Do I like Linux and open platforms? Sure! Tampering is fun! Do I hate people using open platforms to scrape my websites and constantly cause load, steal my content and use that for AI training? Also, yes.
But how can I fight that? We run into CAPTCHAs, Cloudflare, Anubis and co. Now that issue is reduced, but the openness is also gone.
And you always see in tech spaces we rather want "dumb" devices rather than smart devices, because we cannot trust them.
Attestation buys you more trust, but at the cost of openness.
But in this case… I don’t know. The OEM is so actively hostile you might be better off just taking the risk with root if you must purchase it at all (and physically removing the radio/microphone hardware not being an option).
The inevitable outcome of this video is that TV vendors are pushed to harden the security and preserve the trust-chain, because part of the (valid) claim is that nefarious actors may break the security to use the device for spying on you.
With support from an actual journalist, it could be reframed to also emphasize the importance of controlled root-access to monitor and control the devices behavior.
But none of this was done unfortunately, and if I'm LG I don't want to see another video where someone reframes user-initiated voice-input for a web-search as spying initiative by showing some device-logs of the transcription process in parallel...
Do you actually want a channel with 2.66 million subscribers to show how to get remote access to TVs used by millions of people? :-P
The influencer economy is a bit soaked these days. You need to crank up the stakes to keep the viewer's attention.
That does not mean that LG does all that by default.
GamersNexus did an investigation which may overstate the privacy threat posed by LG smart TVs.
Otherwise, they start a voice command service (clearly displayed on the screen) and then say your TV is recording on your conversation. Like duh, of course my TV starts recording voice when I use voice commands.
And of course you have to trust LG with their TV and (not) having access. That same logic applies to every different company.
Maintaining enemy lists like the one of Drew linked there has been illegal in Germany since 2021 as part of the government's (very necessary!) efforts against hate crimes and right-wing extremism.
Or at least that's my understanding of the law there. Maybe it's exempt based on technicalities.
In any case, I can in many cases emotionally relate to why he is doing that, but.. oof.
I always say any serious computer needs blinkenlights and a smart TV has literally millions of them.
216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375
> If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security. If he can demonstrate someone remotely jailbreaking your TV, or flipping on those settings without you knowing or doing anything to your TV, that would be a far more damning issue, in my view.
What is this authors point?
LG doesn’t need a root exploit to get this info because they made the fucking thing.
I read the article and then grepped for “Texas” to see if I missed it. The author never mentions the fact that this data collection was only found out initially because of a Texas government lawsuit that LG settled on by agreeing to give “informed consent” to users about data collection and then the warnings started popping up in unexpected places.
Is the author arguing that jailbreaking your device to find out what the manufacturer can do to gather data on you is dangerous because I don’t know, questioning your corporate overlords is bad or something?
This is the major issue with this video: It mixes stuff done by LG (ACR) with stuff done via rooting (audio recording). And now people think LG is 24/7 recording your conversations and uploading them somewhere. This has not been proven.
That nuance is important if you value good journalism.
Otherwise if we're just our here throwing random allegations because "corp bad", might as well say LG 's TVs are turning the frickin' frogs gay.
Spend some time building your reputation before arguing for divisive topics or be ignored.
Consider it a mechanical Turk but for social trust.
You have to start somewhere. Better makes sense to start looking at the arguments rather than the author.
It also helps you train your brain. Stop trusting someone solely because of who they are.
You can comment about anything here and build credibility.
Just don’t start on the most divisive topics.
Sorry but such contrary takes in the face of this sort of evidence are either contrary for the sake of it or paid astroturfing.
However, just because your TV does ACR, does not immediately mean they listen 24/7 through your TV through any conversations even if the TV is off.
That is another, also quite different level of claim.