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.

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)

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...

If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security.

Wow. Please stop spreading things like this.

Not having root means not owning a device you paid for and have in your home.

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

What am I meant to take away from this? If you look at other IoT devices, they’re going to show the same thing. But here it’s presented as bad. Why?

The influencer economy is a bit soaked these days. You need to crank up the stakes to keep the viewer's attention.

If you root or jailbreak your devices, you've, by their very nature, broken their security.

Yeah no this is just incorrect. There's many cases where jailbreaking actually fixes issues when a vendor abandons the platform. It also enables usefulness for a product long after it's been EOL'd.

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?

216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

https://smackernews.com/item/49592375 HN

GamersNexus did an investigation which may overstate the privacy threat posed by LG smart TVs.

They literally write "Now, I’m not going to claim to be a network expert. I may be totally off-base, but what? Reverse DNS? I don't know what this means."

The findings are a smoking gun already.

The bar shouldn't be a video of an NSA agent or someone from LG listening your everyday life. I don't doubt this happens but we shouldn't expect gamernexus to be able to prove it.

Jesus some people with their whataboutism and nihilism.

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.