> Is there anyone who has done a technical write up and investigation into the firmwares?

I extracted the firmware and filesystem of a webOS 3.5 and webOS 24 TV previously so I could remove the spying bits and get an internet connected TV back. I asked Claude Opus 5 to do some analysis on the ACR implementation yesterday. I haven't had time to check it myself, so it might give some insight but take it with a grain of salt. Also because I'm not entirely sure I extracted the complete filesystem for the webOS 24 TV.

See the documents temporarily hosted here [1][2][3]. You can find the Markdown originals in the HTML source. The Markdown has also been pasted here [4] (although the forum software has sometimes inserted a lot of tildes).

LG uses the "Alphonso SDK" for ACR, a company which it seems to have a majority stake in [5].

WebOS itself is actually pretty neat once you get root on the device. It still has open source releases, uses a well documented service bus, the UI apps are unobfuscated Javascript. It's a genuine Linux TV if only LG allowed you to get root and would not install spyware by default. Secure boot unfortunately does prevent you from messing with the boot process.

If you want to know anything specific, let me know. There's also a pretty active Discord (ugh) community here [6].

Personally, I'm most interested whether LG and other device manufacturers are getting informed consent for ACR in European markets, and what the consent screen looks like. I doubt that many consumers actually know what they're consenting to, which might be a GDPR violation.

[1] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/webos-24.html

[2] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/webos-3.5.html

[3] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/comparison.html

[4] https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/86090672#8...

[5] https://www.adexchanger.com/tv-2/lg-grabs-a-majority-stake-i...

[6] https://openlgtv.github.io/