Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

https://spur.us/blog/smart-tv-apps-residential-proxy-sdks

by microcode • 1 month ago

274 169 1 month ago

spur.us

knollimar• 1 month ago

This feels straight out of Silicon Valley (show)

bigfishrunning4• 1 month ago

It also feels straight out of Silicon Valley (place)

cj4• 1 month ago

I imagine most smart TVs don't support multitasking or apps staying alive in the background, hopefully?

microcode5• 1 month ago

The consent screens say that they "may continue running in the background after you close the app".

dotancohen3• 1 month ago

Why would you imagine that? Which non-multitasking OS do you think these devices are based on?

tumdum_• 1 month ago

For example OS running on Amazon fire stick 4K kills your background processes after ~20 minutes.

cj4• 1 month ago

Specific to LG tvs:

https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/getting-started/ap...

andai• 1 month ago

I've always have a deep, instinctive revulsion for smart TVs, but every year I read of some new mandmade horrors beyond comprehension, and it escalates by a few more points.

thewebguyd• 1 month ago

Same, but for "smart" anything in the home that requires an internet connection and does not let me set it up or run it LAN only.

People forget the reasons TVs got cheaper is because smart TVs are heavily subsidized with ads and your watch data.

I have the most "low tech" home of any of my peers, intentionally.

drnick15• 1 month ago

This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.

layoric• 1 month ago

Coming for PC monitors as well, LG again leading the charge.. see "smart gaming monitor", same BS.

201984• 1 month ago

This needs to be illegal.

gruez4• 1 month ago

Why? The only thing that's vaguely objectionable is the fact the consent screen's wording of "download public web data from the internet" omits important information on what's actually happening and the associated risks. Otherwise I'm not sure how you can come up with a principled justification of the ban beyond just "AI scrapers bad" or "hiding identity". Tor relays and VPNs are basically doing the same thing, except with clearer disclosure about what actually goes on.

bigfishrunning4• 1 month ago

This is why I don't run a tor endpoint; possibly objectionable traffic I don't control sourced from my network. All it takes is one horrible request to come from your IP and you're on a list

ff317• 1 month ago

From the content hosting side (getting reamed by scrapers overloading infrastructure), the problem is that we have to be able to set "reasonable" ratelimits to share finite network uplink and server cpu resources between all of our real users and these scrapers.

When you can identify the nature of the traffic (quickly in realtime, based on simple deterministic rules), you can protect the resources: you can rate/concurrency -limit the AI scrapers in the name of saving resources for the real humans, effectively putting the scrapers in a lower priority band (which is how it generally worked for search engine scrapers before!).

The problem is they're using resiproxies to disperse and whitewash their traffic, making it extremely difficult to tell their requests apart from the legitimate human requests. They're basically lying to us about the origin, and thus denying us the ability to put them in a lower priority band than humans.

They may scrape us at, say, 25K reqs/second, but it's coming from 50K random residential eyeball IPs at an average rate of only 0.5 reqs/second/IP, and then they're intentionally lying with the UA and headers and other fingerprint details as best they can to "blend in" with the humans so that we can't differentiate.

Let's do an analogy: Imagine if there was a neighborhood grocery store you and all your neighbors rely on for food. It's cheap because they keep their margins low, and more importantly the next store down the road is like 50 miles further away. That store 50 miles down the road also charges double the price. Now they've decided to play arbitrage: they load up 100 employees in the back of an air conditioned semi, clothe them to look like local shoppers, park it 3 blocks from your neighborhood store hidden inside a fenced property, and have them all go in and buy out all the inventory in the store over the course of a couple hours. The store just looks like it's having a great sales day at first. All these customers waiting in line, each getting just a few things at a time. But two hours later, the store shelves are empty, the semi is loaded up, and they're headed 50 miles back to double the price and sell it to someone else. You go in to buy some veggies to cook dinner and there's nothing to buy.

We've been playing this game with AI scrapers and resiproxies for way too long, and someone needs to hold them accountable for their fraud.

tadfisher2• 1 month ago

Does there need to be a principled justification beyond that? I used to be on the side of the traffic, as in, it does not matter where traffic originates as long as it's not abusive. But the fact is that too many scrapers exist which are, in fact, bad. Their behavior is bad, their programming is bad, and they result in way too high costs for free infrastructure, thus they are morally bad.

I expect AT&T and Comcast to offer a residential proxy service any day now.

refulgentis• 1 month ago

12 minute article.

70% AI.

The only content not flagged?

Copy and pasted PR comments.

Invisible Unicode characters, triads, unnecessary markdown.

Good work, obviated by bloviating. Readers dropping off near-instantly.

A company leaving a slop trail behind its wake.

AI DDOSing should be shameful.

https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html

jonhohle• 1 month ago

It’s exhausting. It’s like every article is written by the same author and that author is also your coworker and personal assistant and also moonlights as Brian, a waiter at Chotchkie’s.

duckfruit2• 1 month ago

Exactly. This is like that Sci fi show where the whole world is taken over by an alien organism and everyone you meet is basically the same one person. The AI is also off-puttingly nice, just like the alien.

Retr0id• 1 month ago

The page has scroll hijacking, too.

tantalor• 1 month ago

Here's a bookmarklet which fixes that:

  javascript:(function(){const e=['wheel','mousewheel','DOMMouseScroll','touchmove'];e.forEach(e=>{window.addEventListener(e,function(e){e.stopPropagation()},{capture:true,passive:true})});const t=e=>{if(!e)return;e.style.setProperty('overflow','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-y','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('overflow-x','visible','important');e.style.setProperty('scroll-behavior','auto','important');e.style.setProperty('position','static','important')};t(document.documentElement);t(document.body);const o=document.createElement('style');o.innerHTML='html, body { overflow: auto !important; overflow-y: auto !important; scroll-behavior: auto !important; position: static !important; height: auto !important; } ::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 12px !important; display: block !important; }';document.head.appendChild(o);})();

duckfruit2• 1 month ago

Yeah, wading through an endless stream of AI slop articles posted here (and elsewhere like on reddit) is exhausting. I suspect I won't be coming here as often anymore, which is a shame, because I used to find this site very informative and engaging.

Though we've always had our fair share of marketing and growth hack posts this turn with AI is just a different level of frustrating. The dead internet theory is unfortunately very real.

kristianp3• 1 month ago

Yes very LLM (Chatgpt?) style, short sentences e.g.:

    "The app goes away. The proxy does not."
    "The app is the wrapper. The residential IP is the product."

Headers are very chatgpt style too: "Why this is dangerous"

The information in the article is valid and they've done the work to get the data, but the LLM style is irritating.

cube2222• 1 month ago

I think it’s worth emphasizing that based on the article, those are third party apps, not first party LG apps.

Based on the headline I thought it’s the built-in apps.

mycall• 1 month ago

This does raise the question if other Smart TVs with the same third party apps have the same issue.

OkGoDoIt2• 1 month ago

In the article they mentioned that Amazon and Roku block apps from using these SDK’s, and specifically after Roku recently made a change to disallow this kind of thing, many of the affected apps were withdrawn from the Roku app store. The implication is that those other smart TVs don’t have the same third-party apps because these apps were specifically created to act as a foothold for these residential proxy networks.

HDBaseT3• 1 month ago

The LG WebOS Store is a different beast.

Just browsing the list of apps raises eyebrows for even the most non-tech audiences. 99% of it is spam, with maybe 1% being well known apps like YouTube.

The rest are weird IPTV Players, Wallpaper apps. It feels like a portal into 2009 apps, but its not.

MoonWalk• 1 month ago

Vizio was caught taking screen grabs and sending them to a server a few years ago.

drnick15• 1 month ago

LG runs its own spyware already (content recognition).

gruez4• 1 month ago

This turned out to be more ethical than I thought. I'd thought there wasn't any consent at all, or the actual mention of proxying was buried in a 20 page EULA.

OkGoDoIt2• 1 month ago

Yeah, this does seem somewhat reasonable. I get that most users will probably accept it without thinking twice, but if you’re going to do something like this, this is at least a fairly upfront and consenting way of doing it. For the TV platforms where this isn’t allowed, you have to wonder if apps are still doing it but just completely secretly, and trying to hide their tracks as well.

LastTrain• 1 month ago

I think the person you were responding to was being sarcastic.

lukax• 1 month ago

Well, that's how data for training LLMs is scraped.

brikym• 1 month ago

And price comparison sites big companies don't like since they want to price discriminate. There are positives to it.

handle584• 30 days ago

Not only this, it also enables sneaker/pokemon/5090 scalping, Chinese/Russian using ChatGPT/Claude. A residential IP in the US is very valuable elsewhere.

doublerabbit• 1 month ago

Walked past a TV and it was advertising a security guard.

Why does a TV need security software?

dewey3• 1 month ago

Because most people (HN is not a representative sample set) are not willing to pay the real price of a TV if it wouldn't be subsidized by adtech.

bigfishrunning4• 1 month ago

It's been a very long time since they were given an option.

HDBaseT3• 1 month ago

I'm not sure the adtech is even enough to subsidize the price in a meaningful way.

Google’s global ad revenue equates to roughly $61 per user per year, most TV manufacturers would be unable to extract that much out per user, even with crazy levels of tracking, ads, etc.

I haven't used a modern TV in a very long time, but I can't imagine LG is extracting over $20 in ad revenue/data revenue per year. It might move the needle on <$500 displays, but when LG displays costing over $5,000 still have this spyware its hard to defend.

acheron• 1 month ago

TVs were unsubsidized by ad tech up until 10 years ago, and I’m pretty sure most people bought TVs back then.

pixelmelt• 1 month ago

Aren't consumer class dumb TVs gone?

wmf3• 1 month ago

Windows needs antivirus so why wouldn't a TV? Unfortunately there's a lot of placebo software out there.

captn3m0• 1 month ago

Has anyone reversed their SDKs to run a swarm that captures enough traffic to see what requests are actually getting made?

pocksuppet3• 1 month ago

It'll be HTTPS but you might be able to know the website, if it proxies DNS or doesn't use ESNI.

topranks6• 30 days ago

A lot of web scraping. The ones that got KimWolf’d were/are doing a lot of DDoS (SYN floods etc).

TurdF3rguson3• 1 month ago

It's not Smart TV apps specifically, it's all free apps. They have to monetize those somehow, don't they? And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?

Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.

recursive• 1 month ago

Not sure if this is ironic, but I know it's possible for apps to exist without being monetized. I'm using Paint.net right now.

CursedSilicon• 1 month ago

To parody the Arthur quote [1]

Do you really think somebody would do that? Just go write apps for the love of programming and not to make money?

[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRGIV3u...

owebmaster• 1 month ago

Yes it's possible for the apps to exist but not the apps programmers if they can't make money to eat

TurdF3rguson3• 30 days ago

Not ironic at all, and you want apps you use to be monetized because otherwise there's no incentive to support them. I feel like that's common sense.

bigfishrunning4• 1 month ago

I pay for apps whenever possible, in some cases it just isn't. Also, you have to trust that paid apps aren't also doing this shit.

zerobees• 1 month ago

Basically it's either this or pay for your apps.

And then paid apps show you ads and monetize anyway.

urbnspacecowboy• 1 month ago

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

If you are paying for the product, you're still the product.

Indeed, if you're a paying customer, there's more incentive to push ads at you, not less, since you obviously have more money to spend. The only winning move is not to p(l)ay.

drnick15• 1 month ago

And you get upset when you see ads, don't you?

Yes and no. I understand that Youtube needs to generate revenue, has staff to pay, etc. About a decade ago, I got an occasional 10 second commercial at the start of a clip, and I could live with that. But Youtube pushed me too far when it started playing two consecutive commercials at regular intervals that cannot be skipped, and I now use uBlock or VacuumTube on all my devices.

TurdF3rguson3• 30 days ago

I solved that by paying for premium.

pocksuppet3• 1 month ago

Good. Fuck Cloudflare and other internet gatekeepers. Confuse their signal as much as possible.

snowe20102• 1 month ago

Huh? This is almost assuredly being used for botnets… that’s not a good thing.

pocksuppet3• 29 days ago

Botnets to bypass Cloudflare. Nobody is using residential proxies for DDoS because incoming bandwidth == outgoing bandwidth.

rustcleaner3• 1 month ago

Agreed. Information wants to be free. I am sad nobody has a LOIC powerful enough to disable CloudF{lare,ront}.

ortusdux• 1 month ago

Maybe Valve will make a TV next

wmf3• 1 month ago

Palmer Luckey said he might make a ModRetro TV.

nekusar• 1 month ago

LOL I posted a few days ago with bullshit from LG smart TVs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618246

I still do not know how the damned thing got internet.

rustcleaner3• 1 month ago

Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!

(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)

lysace• 1 month ago

Surely they will just make it mandatory, at some point?

MBCook2• 1 month ago

I remember seeing reports a few years ago about some TV that would constantly complain if it wasn’t connected. I don’t know what brand it was.

popcornricecake• 1 month ago

The only time mine were ever connected to the internet was to update the software, and for that the easiest thing I thought was to host a temporary wifi hotspot (using a phone).

rustcleaner3• 1 month ago

My concern is your telemetry may have been stored up to that point, then forwarded upon connecting.

drnick15• 1 month ago

This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc.

[0] https://plasma-bigscreen.org/

Dig1t• 1 month ago

This looks great, it just needs some hardware to run on with a nice remote. Does any hardware like that exist?

gozucito• 1 month ago

I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one.

A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.

SchemaLoad• 1 month ago

Having 2 remotes is so much easier than trying to flash custom firmware on the TV

notatoad• 1 month ago

this is a solved problem on basically any modern tv: HDMI-CEC lets your appletv control your tv without using the tv remote.

jerrysievert• 1 month ago

why were you using 2 remotes? did you have other systems attached to the television, such as a game console, or cable?

the Apple TV provides hdmi cec, which should control your television through the hdmi cable.

elahd• 1 month ago

Put the TV remote in a drawer and only use the Apple TV remote. With CEC enabled, that one remote will control power and volume for the TV and any connected audio devices. It'll also switch to the proper input when the Apple TV is turned on.

cheschire• 1 month ago

I only use one remote. The tv remote. I just enable HDMI-CEC

I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary

wolttam• 30 days ago

A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.

That sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to sign up to this much work for every product I own that I want an iota of control over.

So I would argue if this is "better" by any stretch of the word

ufmace• 1 month ago

Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.

There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.

topranks6• 30 days ago

I connect every few months (with cable) to check for firmware updates and the like. Otherwise agree it stays offline.

lbotos3• 1 month ago

I'll get on my high horse and say you can get solid "DID/Commercial" TVs for not that much more: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1788343-REG/samsung_q...

I got this a few months ago -- 4k, solid brightness, and ok color.

Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.

I use it with an apple TV with CEC on the TV -- I turn on the apple tv, TV turns on straight to apple interface. I turn off from the apple remote, TV turns off.

It's effectively "an apple TV" -- I'm happy.

gruez4• 1 month ago

Is it the OMG BEST? no. But I Disabled wifi, and even the channel display.

Why not just get a (presumably subsidized) smart TV instead, and skipping the premium? It'd also be not disconnected from the internet, and despite vague HN/reddit speculation that TVs have cell modems in them, that has yet to be confirmed.

LeoPanthera• 1 month ago

If you do this, connect it to the internet at least once, because most smart TVs ship with missing features that aren't activated until you do a firmware update.

lbotos3• 1 month ago

I wanted more control and no UI. The commercial ones do that -- I think this was like $150 more than the "samsung smart ui" one... Never seeing a smart TV interface was worth that for me. YMMV.

afavour• 1 month ago

I have a TCL Roku TV that I use disconnected and with an Apple TV. It still has annoyances here and there, like pausing for three seconds or so on every startup before it switches inputs. I’d pay a mild premium to not have that.

initramfs3• 1 month ago

I use HDMI on my Smart TV and just disabled wifi because I realized it was downloading more than half my bandwidth (a small amount, in fact). It could have been doing an update but I found no reason to leave it on. Occasionally I'll use YT or Prime since it doesn't have to be tethered to a PC, but overall it's nicer as a monitor than a streaming app.

Barbing2• 1 month ago

Some instead assert TVs might connect to the first open network available, like if a neighbor briefly opened a hotspot, which sounds more believable.

sidewndr46• 1 month ago

I don't think you can use the ones at wal-mart without an internet connection of some kind

helterskelter• 1 month ago

These days a lot of them will nag you if you don't connect them to the internet and only use them as a dumb display.

hoherd2• 1 month ago

That looks like The Frame from Samsung. Does it have a matte surface? What version of Tizen is it running? Does it have API access?

glaslong3• 1 month ago

This would be my dream tv. I like the matte look of the Frame a lot (I have one), but it's not at all worth the being subjected to the terrible Samsung software experience

p0wn• 1 month ago

Begs the question - why has apple never come out with a TV.

MBCook2• 1 month ago

Why should they? It’s an absolute cutthroat business with next to no profit margin.

All you gotta do is add an Apple TV and you got everything they would give you. And they make nice margins.

Apple seems to have next to no interest in making displays at all. We are lucky whenever a new one gets announced.

newsoftheday• 1 month ago

We keep our TV dumb, have a laptop behind it running Kubuntu Linux. Stream in everything in Chrome. Use an Air Mouse and wireless keyboard sometimes. Works great.

Banditoz• 1 month ago

What's the current OLED recommendation today?

thfuran• 1 month ago

Last time I looked, I couldn't find an OLED commercial display like that.

fmajid3• 29 days ago

I'd recommend a Samsung S95. Great matte OLED screen, the TV works just fine even if you never set up the not-so-smart features.

cognitiveinline• 30 days ago

Nitpick, hobby horse, not high horse.

lbotos3• 30 days ago

Huh?

“Get off your high horse” is the phrase I flipped because I was grandstanding.

What phrase are you referencing?

fmajid3• 29 days ago

Some TCL TVs will refuse to work unless you connect them to a network with access to the home base. Fortunately, my Samsung S95D doesn't (lovely matte OLED screen), and is perfectly usable without a network connection or even setting up the Smart TV features. The only controls I need on it are volume and HDMI input switching. Like you, I use two AppleTV 4Ks as sources, one tied to my US Apple ID, one for the UK one. At some point, I will also connect my Oppo UDP-203 4K Blu-Ray player, but I haven't needed to in the 2 years since I moved to the new house.

stasomatic• 25 days ago

This is a 43" at $800. Effectively 3x higher priced than a Costco/Walmart special. Why not just block the nasty bits on the router, unless out of principle?

dupontcyborg• 1 month ago

this is a way smaller deal than acr. i personally don’t connect my smart tv to my network and use an apple tv instead

wmf3• 1 month ago

The concept of consent-based privacy has completely failed, first with GDPR then this.

xnx• 1 month ago

What portion of Fox's acquisition thesis for Roku was activating residential proxies (distributed AI crawling!) across all the units?

kristianp3• 1 month ago

Is bypassing scraping blocks the main purpose of these residential proxy networks?

duskwuff2• 1 month ago

Yes. For instance, Bright Data describes itself, on its home page, as the "all in one platform for proxies and web scraping".

HDBaseT3• 1 month ago

"Publishes with the most proxy flagged apps"

1. Desoline (based in Netanya (Israel)

2. Bright Data (based in Israel)

Interesting.

port113• 30 days ago

A country known for plenty of spyware and iOS hacking tools. Interesting indeed.

(I didn’t draw any conclusions.)

sph2• 29 days ago

I did. Israel is with North Korea at the bottom of the list of countries I'd do business with.

In fact, it's worse: my problem with NK is with its leadership, as I don't have anything against its citizens. I can't say the same for the state of Israel. May they reap what they've sown.

cute_boi2• 29 days ago

Just in case people don't know Bright data is formally Luminati proxy. They are well known for doing shady things...

ctippett• 1 month ago

I absolutely adore my 2018 jailbroken LG OLED, although it pains me that everything I love about this TV are features the manufacturer actively discourages and wishes I never had access to.

throwawa14223• 1 month ago

So is there a residential proxy blacklist I can run on my firewall? Any action I can take as an admin to put a stop to this?

topranks6• 30 days ago

It’s very tricky because the IPs are all on normal user ranges you can’t block without blocking those users.

The company behind this blog - spur.us - offer some paid services I think. There is also this project from Wikimedia which uses that data to produce more manageable lists:

https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/sre/CIDERGRINDER

whalesalad• 1 month ago

I have a few LG OLED tv's. I do not ever connect them to the internet - I just treat them as dumb hdmi/dp displays. One is driven by an Apple TV, the other is connected to a Linux gaming pc. Haven't had any issues at all.

cullenking• 1 month ago

I just implemented bot and crawler detection as well as ASN based blocking for our website, because I’ve seen a massive rise in scraping coming from VPNs and other networks that mix legit and illegitimate traffic to our service. My theory is that small companies are scraping the shit out of everything and selling results to llm creators. It’s going to be interesting to see this expand into residential internet providers through holes like this… wild new world!

NordStreamYacht• 1 month ago

I have my smart tv on a separate router and it's powered off most of the time. An accident of wiring.

h4kunamata• 1 month ago

I have a 2018 Samsung QLED SmartTV, I use Pihole to block data collection and since it has Google DNS hardcoded in it, I use OPNSense Firewall rules to enforce any DNS request to Pihole.

My TV has only one AD that no longer shows for years now, LG is ADs all over the place. My home setup allows me to have a smartTV without compromises it.

Since it runs TizenOS, I can use my Linux PC to install remove apps from it like installing Jellyfin App so I do not depend on Samsung releasing it to the app store.

hnburnsy• 30 days ago

TV never connected to internet, streaming box, and streaming box on its own isolated vlan (or guest network)

londons_explore• 30 days ago

This is a good thing.

If you could anonymously proxy from anywhere to anywhere else, the internet would be region-lock-free and anonymous again, just like it was to support it's boom in 1999.

Good on these guys I say. When it becomes normalized, we can integrate these 'privacy proxies' into desktop and mobile OS's too.

jhartikainen• 30 days ago

Good point, hadn't thought at all of this kind of perspective. Though the fact it's some dodgy residential proxy provider that runs this stuff makes me feel like it isn't going to become available for something good.

ThePowerOfFuet• 30 days ago

So you think until someone breaks your door down because of something sent from your connection.

topranks6• 30 days ago

Nah it’s messing up peoples home internet, and massively abused to perform denial of service attacks and scraping of web content by large AI companies who are otherwise blocked.

Your vision of a randomly-routed mesh internet overlay is also not very scalable bandwidth or latency wise.

tulio_ribeiro• 30 days ago

LG’s guidelines state:

- “Your app should only collect the minimum user data required for providing service and should avoid collecting unnecessary data.”

- “LG performs security reviews on submitted apps before distribution, using the vulnerability analyzing system.”

- “All app developers must complete and submit well-defined and comprehensible data safety information detailing collection, usage, and sharing of user data.” They explicitly classify the "IP address" under Device Identifier Information.

https://webostv.developer.lge.com/develop/guides/privacy-gui...

Blatant lies.

memcg• 29 days ago

Is there enough 4K content available to justify replacing an older Samsung 1080P LCD? I still find free TVs on Craigslist. When I see 4K TVs running in demo mode at Costco I'm impressed, but at home watching World Cup over the air or on Fios at 1080P looks good enough. I don't pay extra for Netflix 4k and most Fios content is not 4K.

manbart• 28 days ago

Ankther example of why "Smart TVs" are peak enshittification

shellwizard• 28 days ago

Yep, never connect them to the Internet, ever

mfro• 28 days ago

Truly despicable shit from these manufacturers. Don't buy smart TVs, or block their network access if you must.

mikestew• 28 days ago

”The researchers recommend that TV platform operators adopt clearer policies for proxy SDKs, require more prominent disclosures, and provide users with greater visibility into how their network connections are being used.”

“Recommend”, eh? I’m sure they’ll get right on it. As the old saying goes, there ought to be a law.

And here is where my disappointment lies:

”For consumers, reviewing installed smart TV applications, limiting downloads to trusted developers, and removing unnecessary apps can help reduce exposure.”

I mean, I guess they can’t come right out and say, “don’t connect your TV to the Internet”. But they should.

Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

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