The IT Nerd

The claim that LG Smart TV’s monitor what you watch is being reported by news outlets including the CBC today. Here’s the details:

The investigation comes after Jason Huntley, a 45-year-old IT consultant in Britain, detailed in his blog how his LG smart TV logged the channels he was watching and sent the data to LG.

He said the company continued to collect which channel he was watching even after he disabled the information collection feature.

“The (LG) server acknowledges the successful receipt of this information back to the TV,” he said in an email. The information appeared to be sent to LG unencrypted, he said.

Also collected were the names of files saved in an external USB hard drive plugged into the TV as well as the TV’s unique identification information.

Now LG is investigating, but this does raise a question: What are the odds that other TV companies that have so called smart TVs are doing the same thing? After all, this info is very valuable. I think it would be handy for Sony, Samsung, and other companies to come clean on what they may or may not be doing. In the meantime, I think I will go for a “dumb” TV for my next TV when the time comes.

UPDATE: News.com is reporting that LG is working on a firmware update to make this problem go away.

This entry was posted on November 21, 2013 at 9:59 am and is filed under Commentary with tags LG, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.