LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps

I am afraid that my dumb TV, which I've been holding onto for many years, might be on its last leg.

I remember seeing privacy guides for smart TVs over the years, does anyone know a place with up to date info?

Most 55inch monitors are now "smart" sadly, so are most "digital signage" products. So there is no longer a way to get a true dumb panel at least over 50 inch

EDIT I am in Australia, there might be products that are available elsewhere but cannot be bought/shipped here

42% of the apps on LG's platform have these quasi-malware SDKs in them? Seems kinda bad, whether it's due to negligence or just pure incompetence? You'd think there might be legal consequences for a corporation that lets their app store turn into a malware delivery system?

What happens to the copies already installed?

Spur says these SDKs can keep running after the app is closed and only stop when the user deletes the app or opts out. LG says developers must remove them or have their apps suspended, but the article doesn’t say whether that disables existing installs. If it doesn’t, LG needs to tell affected users which apps to remove.

Does webOS have any way to kill an installed app remotely?

Stop hooking up your LG tv to any network

My question is how would a user know their TV is being used like this?

Also this is the reason you down download random crap onto your devices.

I have an LG that is connected on its own network with bare minimal apps (netflix, prime, etc) because it's too convenient for my family. I actually bought it because it didn't display ads on the home screen like the other smart TVs I'd researched. Thought LG was the lesser evil, turns out they're all a bad as each other.

If other non-Android-based TV manufacturers follow, this will have a much bigger impact on the spread (and cost) of scraping than either Anubis or Cloudflare.

is this some kind of tactical distraction from the other LG headlines this week?

I thought residential proxies are already banned from SmartTV apps by virtue of practically every APK under the sun being subject to the Google Play terms of service.

My TV doesn't know my router's wi-fi password.

Apparently all these vendors did nothing to prevent this, a nice article from spur intelligence

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/video/how-smart-tvs-may-be-s...

Heh. tinfoil hat on I always suspected that the AI gods would manifest themselves through TV. Hat stays on from this point on. It is not like LG suddenly found it in their heart to stop the money flow from the offending apps. Not when combined with recent security incident at frontier labs and current admin freaking out over open models.

Honestly I have nothing but anger for all parties involved here. We need to treat any appliance as hostile. Vote for people that will stop this stuff. Don't buy it. This is digital assault and should be treated as such.

If any of the HN crowd reading this are tech reviewers, make privacy and security a first class feature of the things you review. If it has a network connection then ask hard questions of the manufacturer about how they are managing that massive responsibility and what promises they have about how they will, and won't, use it. Ask what qualifies a 'trusted partner' and get a list of them so you can dig into them and report on how much those partners can or can't be trusted.

I really don't care how bright the screen is if this type of stuff happens. I'd rather watch nothing.

I'm very worried with all this bullshit around TVs.

I've been running the same Samsung UE40C6530 since 2010. It's 16 f'ng years and the thing works flawlessly like the first day. No other electronic device in my life worked so well, during so long.

But I'm about to move to a new home, and it feels like it's about time to get something more modern, at least a 4k TV.

But I'm honestly totally lost at what to buy. I do not want a "Smart" tv that's slow to start, bloated with crap, installing updates every day, and maybe even spying on me.

I want a plain, old, normal TV. If possible without Android or any advanced operating system. Just a TV. I'll plug external content myself, either via a Chromecast device, or something similar. I don't want my TV to be a full fledged computer.

Is there such a thing? What would you buy nowadays? It seems you're forced to get yet another computer to maintain and be worried about whatever you buy.

So does this mean that using a proxy will cause all of the "smart" features to stop working? Win-win.

Thanks for the heads up, LG.

Those cheap/discount tv brands make soo much sense these days

Is there a (technical) difference between a residential proxy and bot network node?

This is the best news I've heard all week. Finally good news for once!

LG is on my blacklist. That means I won't buy LG products and in my job actively fight against buying products from them. And they put themselves onto that lost with their behavior.

Stop buying "smart" TV

One day there will be a decent TV that can be relatively easily hacked to run on open source firmware. My wife and I are moving soon, and I'm happy we've decided not to have a TV in the new place. Neither of our current LG TV's have ever been connected to the network, but it will feel good when I sell or give the cursed things away.

lg's had a good run of being a monitor, their software was a bit shit but the hardware supported e-arc etc.

i've got 2 expensive lg tvs and i bought them because you don't need to use their remote, it just turns on and shows the picture.

None of my TVs are connected to the Internet. That said, I could really do with a better open source fullscreen UI, especially since I mainly just want a web browser that works good. I'm just using KDE Plasma with a custom daemon to control the TV power state over an HDMI CEC adapter plus an old K830 keyboard.

I'm, frankly, a bit annoyed by this whole thing; I'd rather have USB adapter RF wireless because it is simpler to deal with vs Bluetooth, but actually I can't even find other Bluetooth keyboards that are as compelling as this K830 and worse yet, they don't even make the K830 anymore. I don't really mind KDE Plasma with just some minor customizations but I don't really like any of the options like Kodi. Maybe Plasma BigScreen will eventually be what I want for that. And finally, HDMI CEC is a pain in the ass. For reasons, I actually use an adapter to get CEC support on a normal PC platform, because most PC HDMI ports can't do it. And also, it's just a bizarre and overly complicated thing. I have it working reliably, but it took some time to iron out all the kinks, particularly because my TV responds quite differently depending on how recently it was powered off.

I really just want a big monitor and to basically just use DPMS... Like a computer does, but large computer monitors tend to be expensive and don't always have remote controls, which admittedly are handy.

The messed up thing is that we need to rely on LG to stop allowing it rather than just making it illegal.

>“The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn’t give consent, such as minors.”

Note that the same applies for the other privacy invasive webos features. But since that doesn't harm big tech's monopoly they will conveniently avoid mentioning it.

I mean, why didn't they do that from the start?

This is madness.

Only LG themselves should be able to have this kind of invasive control over your television.

[dead]

Sharing a slice of your internet in a privacy preserving way in exchange for something of value, seems fair, no?

Tell your relatives, buy an apple tv