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LG's statement: > ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect scr

LG's statement: > ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV. So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible. This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification. https://arxiv.org/html/2409.06203v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2409.06203v1 We're going to have to get saavy in pulling apart the distinction between "I look at everything and then send a nice summary back to my manufacturer" and "I send everything back to my manufacturer". As AI gets cheaper and more efficient, it'll be baked into everything, and will distill signal at the edge and send the good bits back to central command. I fear the legalese in the ToS will obscure this new way of "not collecting" user information.

ionwake 4d ago
After doing some investigation into my Bang Olufsen after some tech not working right apparently Dev mode on it allows "Most probable raw grab: ThinQ/SSAP on the LAN after pairing — ~960×540 JPEG. Live Plus/ACR: most probably sends a fingerprint, not a retrievable raw frame." As per HN thread last week
cogman10 4d ago
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible. It's probably easier to do and every bit as accurate as just using a screenshot. And it's still exactly what I don't want them doing. There's literally zero reason for LG to be building an advertising profile on me because I was foolish enough to buy one of their TVs. This isn't something that makes their products better, it's spying. Here's how it's been done in the past https://www.cameronmacleod.com/blog/how-does-shazam-work https://www.cameronmacleod.com/blog/how-does-shazam-work Audio is a bit easier to turn into a fingerprint for identification vs video. Video has a lot of smaller subtle changes that happen from things like compression which make it a lot harder to identify. It's why youtube still hasn't figured out piracy, but they'll knock you immediately if you play 5 seconds of copyrighted music.
- IanCal 4d ago
  It’s a lot less data to process as well.
- nyctimus 4d ago
  wouldn't taking screenshots in fact not always be possible depending on the content you are watching? For example netflix with their hardware level drm? (Although its their TV they possibly have ways around that with some custom hardware)
  - tiahura 4d ago
    lg’s display controller has to know what to send to panel
  - cogman10 4d ago
    LG sits at exactly the location where screenshots are possible. Eventually, a digital signal needs to be converted into pixels on a screen. Once that happens, it's trivial to also pipe those pixels into a screenshot. It's the reason DRM for digital media is pretty dumb IMO. The most sophisticated DRM still has to be decoded at some point for the end user to enjoy it. It can always be broken with a camcorder (though quality suffers). However, there exists devices which decode the HDMI signal so doing a pure digital signals.
  - 14 4d ago
    I can assure you while out sailing the high seas I have watched many Netflix titles. So their DRM is literally only there to make the experience shittier for the honest customers.
- CommanderData 4d ago
  As much as I detest ACR this seems more plausible than screenshots but I wouldn't trust LG regardless. Audio is much easier to fingerprint and match against content.
- ryandrake 4d ago
  To me, it's not even about why they're doing it (building an advertising profile). I don't want them doing it at all, for any reason. When I buy something from the store, my relationship is between me and the store, for the 30 seconds it takes for me to pay for it. I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer. I don't want to be tethered in any way to the manufacturer. I don't want to have an account with the manufacturer. I don't want the device sending anything to the manufacturer, advertising related, telemetry, or even a single bit "user has used your product." Do you get it, manufacturers?? I don't want any kind of relationship with you! I want to purchase my product and use it by myself not with you.
deleted 4d ago
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NooneAtAll3 4d ago
> ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology so they aren't even denying listening in on everything?
- xethos 4d ago
  "Everything" would include the microphone, both in the remote and the TV. They're claiming to split off the audio, with one path going to the speakers (and there to your ears), and the other path being hashed (and from there to LG). They still claim to get your media's audio, but deny using the microphones.
  - juiceland 4d ago
    If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? It says the TV owner is "solely responsible" for obtaining all necessary consents from third parties whose voices may be recorded by the device, and must warn household members and guests that their voices may be recorded, and if someone does not agree, the TV's microphone and voice functions need to be turned off. [0] [0] https://www.lg.com/us/terms https://www.lg.com/us/terms
    - gruez 4d ago
      >If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? Other people have mentioned there's other voice features like diction/voice control, so it's plausibly for that.
      - mitxela 4d ago
        That's probably the program that uploads everything you say then. Nobody thought the ACR was doing that.
    - BalinKing 4d ago
      > If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? 1. The introduction says that Smart TVs are not included in this ToS ("not including Smart TVs"). 2. Where do the terms say anything about "sensitive" content? The closest thing I see is section 4.d, but that's just about wiretapping/privacy laws in general.
cyanydeez 4d ago
this is clearly an "anonymization" claim. What is anonymous: we record all the hashs from all the programs people are watching to identify people watching the same thing. What is not anonymous: we hash all the content in the world, along with hashing the content people are watching, and reconstruct what they watched.
BeetleB 4d ago
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible. It apparently is. Do you know the Nielsen Ratings? That's exactly how they know what people are watching these days. I've been contacted by them to be one of their subjects. They ship you a device that listens and recognizes based on content. They look for certain "fingerprints" in the audio and match against that - it's not capable of recording our conversations, etc (or so they claimed).
- mitxela 4d ago
  Also, they didn't claim that.
- prasadjoglekar 4d ago
  It's how things were always done. The content from broadcasters has/had audio watermarks...frequencies which humans can't hear.
  - grvbck 4d ago
    As far as I know, watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization. Nielsen researched and developed ACR technology but it never required watermarks. When Nielsen first started collecting data (1950s), they handed out diaries to a group of around 5 000 selected households. Nielsen would then collect these diaries and extrapolate viewing patterns across the entire population. After that came phone surveys. Next step (1980s) was the "people meter", a small box attached to the TV that could automatically detect which channel was tuned and which household members were in the room. In the 1990s the set-top box made all of that redundant as the cable and satellite providers could directly see which channel every single box was tuned to at all times.
    - salawat 4d ago
      Broadcasters: the cutting edge of streaming information is ours! Now let's make it so everyone unknowingly broadcasts as much info back to us as possible! Poor Farnsworth. He just wanted edutainment, man.
llm_nerd 4d ago
> That...doesn't seem plausible. In what way? Dramatically lower processing and signature complexity. Audio signature matching is trivial and extremely well known. I see absolutely nothing implausible about this, and it seems a robust, viable solution. > This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification. That paper found no such thing. That paper actually demonstrated that they have no clue how the ACR happened, they just demonstrated that playing content yielded content IDs. It is more likely they were witnessing audio ACR happening, exactly as LG described.
beambot 4d ago
Get saavy...? More like "will require trust that manufacturers are honest" -- which I won't believe for a miliesecond.
- rpdillon 4d ago
  Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that. No one reads the ToS anyway. Just stop buying TVs, now that Sceptre stopped delivering the last models of consumer dumb TVs.
deleted 4d ago
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varispeed 4d ago
The key problem is content identification, not how it is done. Seems like they are doing "look over there!" thing.
surcap526 4d ago
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PunchyHamster 4d ago
on-device transcript of audio recording is not audio recording ;)
drdexebtjl 4d ago
No, I think they’re saying two separate things: - ACR uses audio fingerprinting - ACR does not collect screen recordings Both can be true if the TV hashes the frames locally and ACR “collects” the hashes.
- snapplebobapple 4d ago
  Or if they took all this time to respond because they were busy putting all the stuff they are denying in a second program they called "bcr"
- mitxela 4d ago
  They're almost certainly being pedantic about what it means to "collect a recording".
GabeIsko 4d ago
Does it matter? Whether they are doing it on device or in the cloud, they are still recording what their customers say and collecting data on it without their consent. To me, this is really an admission.
phendrenad2 4d ago
Has that paper been replicated?
GeekyBear 4d ago
How they spy on people isn't the issue. Spying on people without explicit consent (in a situation where you can say no without penalty) is the issue.
mitxela 4d ago
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible. Wrong. They claim it doesn't record video. Recording means saving permanently - live processing is not recording. ACR is processing the video output live. Notice what they don't say at all. ACR is just one type of spying. A completely separate feature records what you say from the microphone. They only claimed ACR doesn't do that, which we knew. They did not claim the TV doesn't do that. This is a carefully crafted PR statement, to avoid saying any lies while making it sound like the accusation was wrong, but it does not actually say the accusation was wrong. We can infer that the likely reason it doesn't say the accusation was wrong is that the accusation is right. Instead, it says several other things, which sound like they are refuting the accusation but are actually refuting other things that nobody said.
- fsuts 4d ago
  Exactly, otherwise LG legal would be threatening the authors to publish an apology or be sued.
  - a34729t 4d ago
    If they aren't suing they are guilty as hell. Even if they were only most guilty they would sue; their legal dept knows they have no legs to stand on.
- thakoppno 4d ago
  > processing is not recording Debatable and definitely semantic - at the very least this requires putting the audio into a buffer, so a newly mallocd block of memory. Sure, it’s not a recording in a conventional sense, but it is a copy of data.
  - mitxela 4d ago
    This is such a programmer view. No lawyer would think that a graphic equaliser records audio.
mrb 4d ago
As usual, the key to explain the discrepancy between LG's claims and the paper 2024 is in the wording. Read carefully: LG claims it "does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV.". IOW they are making the technical distinction between "fingerprinting" and "screenshots or recordings". And specifically, they are not confirming or denying that video fingerprinting are done. What I think is likely is, as the paper states, that they fingerprint both audio and video. Upload both to their servers. But they end up using only the audio fingerprint for ACR. In this situation, neither LG's statement, nor the paper's statement, nor the GamerNexus folks's claims are incompatible with each other. It even makes sense from a technical standpoint: it is far easier to uniquely identify content by audio than by video, as a fingerprint of a few milliseconds of audio is pretty darn ideal, compared to fingerprinting even a single video frame which has hundreds of ways it could be compressed depending on codecs, bitrate, resolution, etc.
klvino 4d ago
From reading other responses, it seems there is an assumption the image itself is fingerprinted. The digital content is encoded, there is essentially a barcode on your TV screen with lines running horizontally that you cannot see with the human eye. The encoding is picked up as the signal, it does not need to see or recognize if that is your favorite actress on the screen.
tclancy 4d ago
Tom's response: "Sounds good, please don't take offense at me adding https://github.com/furkan-bayrak/lg-tv-blocklist https://github.com/furkan-bayrak/lg-tv-blocklist to the PiHole. Can never be too safe, right?"
- pnw 4d ago
  FWIW, LG will connect to a public DNS and use encryption so a basic PiHole list doesn't help unless you combine it with firewall rules. See the caveats section of that Github link.
  - tclancy 3d ago
    Yeah, I went with just the Safe settings for now as I am leaving for the week and didn’t want the rest of the house to have to fix something.
MisterTea 4d ago
The thing which depresses me the most is all these so-called smart TV's are giant Arm computers that run malicious software. Imagine if we could re-flash your TV with Linux or whatever.
- ssl-3 4d ago
  I can imagine that. We'd have a slow SBC with a fast video decoder, a huge screen that is inseparable and also now uncalibrated, some video inputs for other things, maybe a tuner if anyone can figure it out, and some kind of network connectivity. I could probably come up with a use for that, but it's about as likely as coming up with a plan for one of the Raspberry Pi Zero Ws that are sitting in the drawer.
jen20 4d ago
> We're going to have to get saavy in pulling apart the distinction between We probably shouldn't: doing any of this horseshit is a good reason to return a product. We should start doing that en mass until they get the idea.
mikeryan 4d ago
I can’t speak to how LG does this now but I ran an agency that built Smart TV apps and built one of the first ACR powered apps on LG about 10 years ago. We were working with a company called “Cognitive Networks” which later was bought by Vizio and is now their Inscape product. At that time one use case wasn’t just tracking but actual interactive “sync to broadcast” apps (you can still do this, no one does, and I don’t know why) At that time during testing Cognitive could literally see what we were playing on our TV (not full video but the frames used for fingerprinting) They don’t use Cognitive anymore for obvious reasons and there are several audio based ACR solutions but they always had issues with sections of video without much audio to work off of so we’re always considered inferior. They are fine for usage data however. Anyway my $0.02
socalgal2 4d ago
Well, not that Apple is doing it all their fans will claim it's ok
bob029 4d ago
This developer did actually find screenshots on their TV of everything displayed on their screen, even when they set every available option that's supposed to stop ACR: https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/x8iBNCPya5 https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/x8iBNCPya5
Grimblewald 4d ago
especially when emebeddings are enough to recover original signal if the model is built for it, which these no doubt are.
throwaway2037 3d ago
Real question here: As I understand, voice (sound) recognition technology mostly uses hidden Markov models, instead of LLM/AI. Do I misunderstand? I think this is how Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Shazam works. To be clear: I do not agree with any of Samsung's and LG's efforts to record sounds/words from user homes!

ionwake 4d ago

After doing some investigation into my Bang Olufsen after some tech not working right apparently Dev mode on it allows "Most probable raw grab: ThinQ/SSAP on the LAN after pairing — ~960×540 JPEG. Live Plus/ACR: most probably sends a fingerprint, not a retrievable raw frame." As per HN thread last week

cogman10 4d ago

> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible. It's probably easier to do and every bit as accurate as just using a screenshot. And it's still exactly what I don't want them doing. There's literally zero reason for LG to be building an advertising profile on me because I was foolish enough to buy one of their TVs. This isn't something that makes their products better, it's spying. Here's how it's been done in the past https://www.cameronmacleod.com/blog/how-does-shazam-work https://www.cameronmacleod.com/blog/how-does-shazam-work Audio is a bit easier to turn into a fingerprint for identification vs video. Video has a lot of smaller subtle changes that happen from things like compression which make it a lot harder to identify. It's why youtube still hasn't figured out piracy, but they'll knock you immediately if you play 5 seconds of copyrighted music.

IanCal 4d ago
It’s a lot less data to process as well.
nyctimus 4d ago
wouldn't taking screenshots in fact not always be possible depending on the content you are watching? For example netflix with their hardware level drm? (Although its their TV they possibly have ways around that with some custom hardware)
- tiahura 4d ago
  lg’s display controller has to know what to send to panel
- cogman10 4d ago
  LG sits at exactly the location where screenshots are possible. Eventually, a digital signal needs to be converted into pixels on a screen. Once that happens, it's trivial to also pipe those pixels into a screenshot. It's the reason DRM for digital media is pretty dumb IMO. The most sophisticated DRM still has to be decoded at some point for the end user to enjoy it. It can always be broken with a camcorder (though quality suffers). However, there exists devices which decode the HDMI signal so doing a pure digital signals.
- 14 4d ago
  I can assure you while out sailing the high seas I have watched many Netflix titles. So their DRM is literally only there to make the experience shittier for the honest customers.
CommanderData 4d ago
As much as I detest ACR this seems more plausible than screenshots but I wouldn't trust LG regardless. Audio is much easier to fingerprint and match against content.
ryandrake 4d ago
To me, it's not even about why they're doing it (building an advertising profile). I don't want them doing it at all, for any reason. When I buy something from the store, my relationship is between me and the store, for the 30 seconds it takes for me to pay for it. I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer. I don't want to be tethered in any way to the manufacturer. I don't want to have an account with the manufacturer. I don't want the device sending anything to the manufacturer, advertising related, telemetry, or even a single bit "user has used your product." Do you get it, manufacturers?? I don't want any kind of relationship with you! I want to purchase my product and use it by myself not with you.

deleted 4d ago

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NooneAtAll3 4d ago

> ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology so they aren't even denying listening in on everything?

xethos 4d ago
"Everything" would include the microphone, both in the remote and the TV. They're claiming to split off the audio, with one path going to the speakers (and there to your ears), and the other path being hashed (and from there to LG). They still claim to get your media's audio, but deny using the microphones.
- juiceland 4d ago
  If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? It says the TV owner is "solely responsible" for obtaining all necessary consents from third parties whose voices may be recorded by the device, and must warn household members and guests that their voices may be recorded, and if someone does not agree, the TV's microphone and voice functions need to be turned off. [0] [0] https://www.lg.com/us/terms https://www.lg.com/us/terms
  - gruez 4d ago
    >If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? Other people have mentioned there's other voice features like diction/voice control, so it's plausibly for that.
    - mitxela 4d ago
      That's probably the program that uploads everything you say then. Nobody thought the ACR was doing that.
  - BalinKing 4d ago
    > If they don’t use the microphones why do they have a statement in their Terms of Service to not say sensitive things in front of your TV? 1. The introduction says that Smart TVs are not included in this ToS ("not including Smart TVs"). 2. Where do the terms say anything about "sensitive" content? The closest thing I see is section 4.d, but that's just about wiretapping/privacy laws in general.

cyanydeez 4d ago

this is clearly an "anonymization" claim. What is anonymous: we record all the hashs from all the programs people are watching to identify people watching the same thing. What is not anonymous: we hash all the content in the world, along with hashing the content people are watching, and reconstruct what they watched.

BeetleB 4d ago

> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible. It apparently is. Do you know the Nielsen Ratings? That's exactly how they know what people are watching these days. I've been contacted by them to be one of their subjects. They ship you a device that listens and recognizes based on content. They look for certain "fingerprints" in the audio and match against that - it's not capable of recording our conversations, etc (or so they claimed).

mitxela 4d ago
Also, they didn't claim that.
prasadjoglekar 4d ago
It's how things were always done. The content from broadcasters has/had audio watermarks...frequencies which humans can't hear.
- grvbck 4d ago
  As far as I know, watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization. Nielsen researched and developed ACR technology but it never required watermarks. When Nielsen first started collecting data (1950s), they handed out diaries to a group of around 5 000 selected households. Nielsen would then collect these diaries and extrapolate viewing patterns across the entire population. After that came phone surveys. Next step (1980s) was the "people meter", a small box attached to the TV that could automatically detect which channel was tuned and which household members were in the room. In the 1990s the set-top box made all of that redundant as the cable and satellite providers could directly see which channel every single box was tuned to at all times.
  - salawat 4d ago
    Broadcasters: the cutting edge of streaming information is ours! Now let's make it so everyone unknowingly broadcasts as much info back to us as possible! Poor Farnsworth. He just wanted edutainment, man.

llm_nerd 4d ago

> That...doesn't seem plausible. In what way? Dramatically lower processing and signature complexity. Audio signature matching is trivial and extremely well known. I see absolutely nothing implausible about this, and it seems a robust, viable solution. > This paper from 2024 investigated both Samsung and LG and found that they both capture screen images for ACR, and send the resulting hash (not the raw content) back to the manufacturer for identification. That paper found no such thing. That paper actually demonstrated that they have no clue how the ACR happened, they just demonstrated that playing content yielded content IDs. It is more likely they were witnessing audio ACR happening, exactly as LG described.

beambot 4d ago

Get saavy...? More like "will require trust that manufacturers are honest" -- which I won't believe for a miliesecond.

rpdillon 4d ago
Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that. No one reads the ToS anyway. Just stop buying TVs, now that Sceptre stopped delivering the last models of consumer dumb TVs.

deleted 4d ago

[deleted]

varispeed 4d ago

The key problem is content identification, not how it is done. Seems like they are doing "look over there!" thing.

surcap526 4d ago

[dead]

PunchyHamster 4d ago

on-device transcript of audio recording is not audio recording ;)

drdexebtjl 4d ago

No, I think they’re saying two separate things: - ACR uses audio fingerprinting - ACR does not collect screen recordings Both can be true if the TV hashes the frames locally and ACR “collects” the hashes.

snapplebobapple 4d ago
Or if they took all this time to respond because they were busy putting all the stuff they are denying in a second program they called "bcr"
mitxela 4d ago
They're almost certainly being pedantic about what it means to "collect a recording".

GabeIsko 4d ago

Does it matter? Whether they are doing it on device or in the cloud, they are still recording what their customers say and collecting data on it without their consent. To me, this is really an admission.

phendrenad2 4d ago

Has that paper been replicated?

GeekyBear 4d ago

How they spy on people isn't the issue. Spying on people without explicit consent (in a situation where you can say no without penalty) is the issue.

mitxela 4d ago

> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible. Wrong. They claim it doesn't record video. Recording means saving permanently - live processing is not recording. ACR is processing the video output live. Notice what they don't say at all. ACR is just one type of spying. A completely separate feature records what you say from the microphone. They only claimed ACR doesn't do that, which we knew. They did not claim the TV doesn't do that. This is a carefully crafted PR statement, to avoid saying any lies while making it sound like the accusation was wrong, but it does not actually say the accusation was wrong. We can infer that the likely reason it doesn't say the accusation was wrong is that the accusation is right. Instead, it says several other things, which sound like they are refuting the accusation but are actually refuting other things that nobody said.

fsuts 4d ago
Exactly, otherwise LG legal would be threatening the authors to publish an apology or be sued.
- a34729t 4d ago
  If they aren't suing they are guilty as hell. Even if they were only most guilty they would sue; their legal dept knows they have no legs to stand on.
thakoppno 4d ago
> processing is not recording Debatable and definitely semantic - at the very least this requires putting the audio into a buffer, so a newly mallocd block of memory. Sure, it’s not a recording in a conventional sense, but it is a copy of data.
- mitxela 4d ago
  This is such a programmer view. No lawyer would think that a graphic equaliser records audio.

mrb 4d ago

As usual, the key to explain the discrepancy between LG's claims and the paper 2024 is in the wording. Read carefully: LG claims it "does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV.". IOW they are making the technical distinction between "fingerprinting" and "screenshots or recordings". And specifically, they are not confirming or denying that video fingerprinting are done. What I think is likely is, as the paper states, that they fingerprint both audio and video. Upload both to their servers. But they end up using only the audio fingerprint for ACR. In this situation, neither LG's statement, nor the paper's statement, nor the GamerNexus folks's claims are incompatible with each other. It even makes sense from a technical standpoint: it is far easier to uniquely identify content by audio than by video, as a fingerprint of a few milliseconds of audio is pretty darn ideal, compared to fingerprinting even a single video frame which has hundreds of ways it could be compressed depending on codecs, bitrate, resolution, etc.

klvino 4d ago

From reading other responses, it seems there is an assumption the image itself is fingerprinted. The digital content is encoded, there is essentially a barcode on your TV screen with lines running horizontally that you cannot see with the human eye. The encoding is picked up as the signal, it does not need to see or recognize if that is your favorite actress on the screen.

tclancy 4d ago

Tom's response: "Sounds good, please don't take offense at me adding https://github.com/furkan-bayrak/lg-tv-blocklist https://github.com/furkan-bayrak/lg-tv-blocklist to the PiHole. Can never be too safe, right?"

pnw 4d ago
FWIW, LG will connect to a public DNS and use encryption so a basic PiHole list doesn't help unless you combine it with firewall rules. See the caveats section of that Github link.
- tclancy 3d ago
  Yeah, I went with just the Safe settings for now as I am leaving for the week and didn’t want the rest of the house to have to fix something.

MisterTea 4d ago

The thing which depresses me the most is all these so-called smart TV's are giant Arm computers that run malicious software. Imagine if we could re-flash your TV with Linux or whatever.

ssl-3 4d ago
I can imagine that. We'd have a slow SBC with a fast video decoder, a huge screen that is inseparable and also now uncalibrated, some video inputs for other things, maybe a tuner if anyone can figure it out, and some kind of network connectivity. I could probably come up with a use for that, but it's about as likely as coming up with a plan for one of the Raspberry Pi Zero Ws that are sitting in the drawer.

jen20 4d ago

> We're going to have to get saavy in pulling apart the distinction between We probably shouldn't: doing any of this horseshit is a good reason to return a product. We should start doing that en mass until they get the idea.

mikeryan 4d ago

I can’t speak to how LG does this now but I ran an agency that built Smart TV apps and built one of the first ACR powered apps on LG about 10 years ago. We were working with a company called “Cognitive Networks” which later was bought by Vizio and is now their Inscape product. At that time one use case wasn’t just tracking but actual interactive “sync to broadcast” apps (you can still do this, no one does, and I don’t know why) At that time during testing Cognitive could literally see what we were playing on our TV (not full video but the frames used for fingerprinting) They don’t use Cognitive anymore for obvious reasons and there are several audio based ACR solutions but they always had issues with sections of video without much audio to work off of so we’re always considered inferior. They are fine for usage data however. Anyway my $0.02

socalgal2 4d ago

Well, not that Apple is doing it all their fans will claim it's ok

bob029 4d ago

This developer did actually find screenshots on their TV of everything displayed on their screen, even when they set every available option that's supposed to stop ACR: https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/x8iBNCPya5 https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/x8iBNCPya5

Grimblewald 4d ago

especially when emebeddings are enough to recover original signal if the model is built for it, which these no doubt are.

throwaway2037 3d ago

Real question here: As I understand, voice (sound) recognition technology mostly uses hidden Markov models, instead of LLM/AI. Do I misunderstand? I think this is how Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Shazam works. To be clear: I do not agree with any of Samsung's and LG's efforts to record sounds/words from user homes!