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Dear Sentinels
Your LG TV is watching you back. Yes, you read that right. According to Gamers Nexus's investigation, charmingly titled "216,000,000 Spy TVs," our televisions have been moonlighting as undercover agents. The culprit is Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR for short. This bit of tech is now standard in most smart TVs and is keen to identify whatever is on your screen, be it a Netflix binge, a gaming session, or even something coming in through HDMI. All of this gets dutifully reported back to HQ. The investigation focuses on LG, and the numbers are enough to make you spill your tea, over 200 million LG smart TVs are estimated to be running this sort of tracking, quietly turning living rooms everywhere into data farms.
What really takes the biscuit is not just that ACR exists, but the way LG's own executives talk about it. The video shows LG Ad Solutions leadership saying, on camera, that the company "owns the glass". Not the person who actually bought the telly, mind you. They have also talked about tracking everyone in the household, linking TVs to your phone, and building up detailed profiles for advertisers. Add in the security holes that could turn your TV into a secret listening device, and you have a situation where "smart" features come at the expense of both ownership and privacy. In this post, I will break down what ACR actually does, what the investigation found, and what you can do if you would rather your TV not join MI5.
But before we get too carried away, let us see what the internet has for us this week.
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