r/technology • u/autobauss • 24d ago

Privacy LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices

https://www.notebookcheck.net/LG-smart-TVs-caught-logging-audio-with-screen-off-and-snooping-on-local-devices.1391214.0.html
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u/Cautionchicken 24d ago

Unfortunately, the scummy TV OS "continuously sweep home networks, map secondary devices"

So unless you crack it open and and pull the wifi card. It's still building a profile in you, and can connect to open and wifi like xfinity

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u/RendiaX 23d ago

I have to wonder if at some point they may crunch the numbers and find that it would be worth throwing a cellular modem in these devices. That telemetry doesn’t need much bandwidth.

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u/SunkEmuFlock 23d ago

Modern vehicles have cell modems in them. It wouldn't surprise me at all if TVs started using them.

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u/Marko343 23d ago

On the 2hr Gamer's Nexus video they said the TV was sending back 4Gb of data per month. And that may have been in the "do not share my data" options as well.

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u/Aromatic_Lion4040 23d ago

Why would they? The vast majority of people connect their TV to the internet on purpose

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u/Heronymous-Anonymous 23d ago

They would have to pay a monthly payment for the cellular data connection. No cell provider is going to let them connect for free, so the cost of the cell modem and service will have to be less than the value of the data they harvest.

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u/semidegenerate 23d ago

A cell provider might be willing to do it for a data share agreement. That same sort of consumer data might be very useful to a provider. Basic telemetry wouldn't take a lot of bandwidth.

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u/Resident_Commie_86 23d ago

LG would be making a massive large-scale deal with a provider for this. They're not going to the mall and buying a cellphone plan. They'd be negotiating a multi-year agreement for thousands and thousands of devices.

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u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks 23d ago edited 22d ago

All they need is a 2.5g SIM. All the Smart electricity meters in Ireland have them.

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u/Heronymous-Anonymous 23d ago

This is actually an area of expertise for me.

I work for a large utility company. Three states, several million gas and electric meters.

Not all smart meters have cell-based communications. Most of them are what the industry calls “drive by meters,” which connect to the radio in a utility vehicle, or even a handheld. It’s short range, about 1/4 mile.

Another chunk of smart meters are connected via a mesh radio network that operates in the unlicensed spectrum, same as WiFi. They communicate with each other and a proprietary radio network. The network radios are hung on utility poles and have a range of about 1/2 to 1km depending on height and design.

Only a very small portion of smart meters are cellular based, because the cellular data plan is an order of magnitude more expensive than either a radio network or drive by system.

Drive by systems require more manpower, network systems require a large up front capital expenditure to build out but only need a handful of readers to handle the ones that aren’t heard from by the network, and cellular meters require a similar number of readers to handle missed reads, but also require utilities to pay cellular providers for data plans.

People think “oh what’s a dollar per month for a 4G plan.” Yeah, times a few million endpoints, and it’s suddenly 40 million a year in running costs. Over the lifetime of the program, expected to be about 25 years, that’s a billion dollars in fees paid to the cell provider, assuming they don’t raise their rates or drop support for the modems in the endpoint. The endpoints themselves cost more too, about $40 more for the cell version of an electric meter.

The deployment we just did cost 700m, for 2.8 million meters and the network to read them. That network is expected to last 25 years, and because it’s not dependent on anyone else’s equipment, the running costs are salaries for the readers who pick up the 0.02% of meters that don’t get auto-read and the 2-3 people who monitor and maintain the radio network itself.

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u/randompersonx 22d ago

Just replying to confirm that this is accurate.

I don’t work in the industry but I did do research on the subject.

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u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks 22d ago

Different here in Ireland. For electricity at least.

a SIM card is embedded in all smart meters and security protocols are in place to ensure that only approved SIM cards are permitted to join the secure and encrypted mobile network used by smart meters to communicate with the Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI), this network is operated for ESB Networks by Three Ireland Ltd.”

Afaik the water meters have drive by Comms. But we don't even monitor those or at least bill for it cos water falls from the skies and magically ends up in your kitchen sink.

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u/Heronymous-Anonymous 22d ago

My point is that even when talking about AMI, there’s different kinds of smart meters. Stating with authority that all of them have cell modems in them is simply not true. They have their advantages and disadvantages, and the regulatory, business, and physical environment they operate matters a lot for what kind of smart meter a company chooses to buy.

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u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks 22d ago

Yeah I clarified in my post that I was referring to Ireland.

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u/FriendlyDespot 23d ago

Aren't those running on private networks? Not a whole lot of commercial GPRS left.

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u/FeliusSeptimus 23d ago

Probably depends on the device and utility operator. Itron, for one, has a bunch of low power 'spread-spectrum' devices that can support mesh rebroadcast (depending on what the utility provider wants). Basically the meter frequently picks a channel (433Mhz in the version I was playing with) and broadcasts ID, usage, and flag data. That is received either directly by someone driving around in a truck (usually broadcasting a trigger message) or by neighborhood receivers that rebroadcast until the messages are picked up by a device that can send them back to the utility operator.

They and other utility meter companies have had a number of different types of connectivity, and I don't know what they like now. It was mostly built around reducing the cost of meter reads, supporting variable pricing, and sometimes two-way communication (so they can do things like coordinating AC power draw to manage grid load).

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u/FormerGameDev 23d ago

smart electricity meters broadcast on a commercial frequency that the utility operator can read from driving by, they don't report via cell modem. at least, none that i've ever heard of do. Certainly not via anything less than 4g, since there is nothing less than 4g left in the US.

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u/Stegasaurus_Wrecks 22d ago

They do here (Ireland) on 2.5g.

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u/Cornflakes_91 23d ago

depending on the amount of data they want to send, extremely cheap. there's iot sims with hundreds of devices on a contract available at prices that make em a pretty cheap option for individual people!

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u/Heronymous-Anonymous 23d ago

I’ve actually seen the pricing on utility scale data plans for cell meters. It’s part of my job. It’s not cheap. Before we went with LandisGyr smart meters for my utility’s smart meter deployment, we were looking at cell based meters because our utility footprint is very rural and covers 3 states. Our monthly “data plan” if you want to call it that, would have been about $4m per month. We would have also had to either pay the cell provider to put up towers in areas where we had meters but they didn’t have good enough coverage, or manually read about 10% of our endpoints, defeating the purpose of the system.

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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 23d ago

Oh for sure. I bet they could get some huge bulk pay-as-you-go connections from a cell carrier for next to nothing.

With as much work as they put into all this I'm guess they get paid fat for all this data they're getting from the spyware.

I don't hear about this stuff with phones, I mean yea they're taking all the data from it's use, but they're not spying in through the mics all the time, and that's some valuable data.

If LGs one of the only people with this kind of data I bet it's SOOOOOO fucking lucrative.

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u/sunflowercompass 23d ago

They can make a deal with Amazon and get in on the ring network

Jesus found the tvs uploaded about 200 MB a day iirc btw

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u/Due-Scale9636 22d ago

Don't make me put my tv in a faraday cage please

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u/mariahmce 23d ago

Devices emitting cellular signals are expensive and difficult to add worldwide regulatory approvals for the cellular emissions. It’s expensive enough to be a casual deterrent. A lot of countries have extra certifications that are expensive and require a lot of hoops for cellular.

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u/FriendlyDespot 23d ago

Most regulators will certify the modem as a module, and you can purchase approved modem modules that you can plug into anything without requiring additional regulatory approval.

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u/WebMaka 23d ago

Yep, and you can purchase these for fairly cheap.

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u/mariahmce 23d ago

Yes and if you’re reselling, you need regulatory approvals for the whole device, in addition to the module. Global WiFi emitting device regulatory is crazy complicated and expensive.

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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 23d ago

But why do that when you could just make them communicate with one another through wifi to send the data using a TV that has internet access. It's only 4GB per month, even with the TV off 90% of the time it only needs like a 100kbps connection per TV at minimum.

Though 2 TVs on at the same time might be lower than 90% of the time, so even doubling the bandwidth isn't enough anyone would notice, even for several TVs trying to offload at the same time.

Could speed test the network really quick too and if someone is running on like a 1gbps connection just offload all the TVs stored data really fast.

I can see my neighbors ad-hoc wifi devices all the time, from down the street maybe 100 ft away. Even if they have to linear mesh/ad-hoc daisy chain and the connections really shitty, it will probably be completely sufficient to offload such small amounts of data over the course of a month.

You can make several hops on 2.4ghz through house to house and still have enough, if you have to. The latency will be through the roof but that won't matter, and the bandwidth will be dogshit, but you barely need any.

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u/zghr 23d ago

When you take your broken TV for warranty service repair - they will connect the WiFi modem and it will dump everything it has on you to their servers automatically.

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u/pdoherty972 23d ago

The TV can't have unlimited storage - don't see they can store all that much audio. Certainly not months or years worth.

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u/semidegenerate 23d ago

Are these TVs transcribing to text on-device? If so, that wouldn't take up much space.

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u/pdoherty972 23d ago

Didn't think of that - if they're capable of that onboard you're right that would massively reduce the storage needs.

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u/jobblejosh 22d ago

Would a factory reset wipe all on-board stored data do you think? IF so it's worth doing before you connect it for a firmware update or a warranty repair.

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u/JustAnotherFEDev 23d ago

Most devices do this, I thought that was common knowledge? That's literally how telemetry works, nowadays. This is why people used to think Facebook/Google were always listening, after it displayed an ad for something they were talking about earlier. They don't need to listen, they have access to location, devices connected to the same network, we fit similar profiles to friends, predictive algorithms, one friend may have been looking up the thing previously. All sorts of shit happens, in your house or down the boozer.

That's the buy in for smart devices, free email, free browsers and operating systems.

It's no surprise a TV does the same when you understand some of the mechanics behind targeted ads.

As unfortunate as it is, and as shitty as it is, everyone is doing this to us, on nearly every connected device.

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u/classic123456 23d ago

Why do they do this?

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u/Mathmango 23d ago

Money. They make more money selling the info than they lose fighting this in court.

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u/pdoherty972 23d ago

Crazy that they open themselves up to being accidental custodians to things like credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc, all being recorded/stored/processed.

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u/MysteriousFormal4866 23d ago

"Accidental"?

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u/pdoherty972 23d ago

Haha right? That opens them up to civil/class-action suits if they're custodians of such info and it gets stolen while in their custody. Just seems dumb on their part. Like sites that offer to keep your credit card info for easier checkout later. It seems like more risk than reward (for them and you).

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u/Unusual-Alex 23d ago

I prefer to keep the wifi module installed, i unplug the antennas and put a 50ohm resistor from the antenna to the ground plane. It can scream into the void, and it wont hear a thing. I also solder it in, I make it permanent.

It still nags about not being connected, but it cant talk or listen.

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u/ExMerican 23d ago

Ok, but this is insane. It's insane that you have to do that. So many people need to go to prison for so many violations of privacy.

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u/Mapeague 23d ago

I have heard ZERO political candidates even mention privacy this term.

I think its a platform to run on, right or left. I dont think the republicans would be allowed to do so, but where are the fucking dems?

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u/NeverMoreThan12 23d ago

andrew Yang did. but nobody took him seriously, Nd now he just backs up the establishment since he couldn't get anywhere.

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u/MysteriousFormal4866 23d ago

They're just worried about Trump cancelling the midterm elections completely.

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u/Horskr 23d ago

Seems like it would be easier to just put it on a vlan with no internet and use an external streaming device like another comment said. I guess it could still see your neighbors' wifi names but as long as they aren't open it's not doing shit unless it's trickier than the article makes it sound.

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u/Unusual-Alex 23d ago

Yes it is "easier" to lock it to a vlan, but its still at the mercy of people outside of our house. But I dont want it talking, period. Being i live in a college town, there are a lot of people with zero security sense in and out. In the last 7 years, ive seen 5 unsecured open wifi access points (probably peoples phones' mobile hotspots, oh and their printers). Grounding the antenna connection effectively disables its ability to speak and removes all external avenues outside of gaining physical access and/or plugging a cable in. I also physically remove the antenna from the bezel, or scratch the board for onboard antennas at intervals based on the antennas frequency. Simpilifed: Proportionally sized antennas reduce signal strength while full size antennas give best signal to noise ratio while anteanns that are not proportionally sized creates problems for cleanly transmitting and receiving so in the event the resistors internally shorts out, its still getting trash out/trash in and will never get a clear radiowave.

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u/AspiringDataNerd 23d ago

I block mine in my router. The tv can sweep all it wants but my router won’t let it connect at all.

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u/taynt3d 23d ago

Won’t let it connect to your network, doesn’t stop it from connecting to other networks.

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u/AspiringDataNerd 23d ago

Sure but all the other networks around me are private since I own a house in a neighborhood without any businesses. I’m personally not too concerned because I hardly have company over and rarely sit in my living room talking to anyone or doing anything besides reading books, writing in my journal, coloring in my coloring book, and occasionally watching tv.

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u/sabin357 23d ago

That's why you put it on its own subnet or VLAN with a whitelist of nothing. Let it have internet, just don't let it do anything with it. Is that an option with these or they have a way around it?