LG Faces Legal Action Over Smart TV Privacy Claims

Portugal’s consumer association Citizens Voice has asked the courts to investigate LG over allegations about data collection by its smart TVs. The group is also calling for some models to be taken off sale and others to receive privacy updates.

The request follows a report that accused LG of creating “216,000 spy TVs,” an allegation the company denies. Citizens Voice says LG’s response did not directly address tests reported by technology publication TEK Notícias involving audio storage while TVs were offline, or named security vulnerabilities in webOS. The association wants a court to assess whether the collection breaches consumer rights and, if so, whether action should be taken against LG and retailers.

The case comes amid wider scrutiny of smart TV tracking. A study by Northeastern University researchers, reported by The Verge, examined automatic content recognition (ACR) on 12 commercial TVs across several platforms. The researchers found that privacy opt-outs fully worked on four platforms: webOS, Google TV on Sony, VIDAA OS and Fire TV OS.

In 30 out of 30 test runs using Samsung’s TV streaming service, researchers observed traffic consistent with ACR despite opt-outs. On Vizio, 100% of opted-out runs still sent traffic to an Amazon Kinesis ACR endpoint, with no decrease. The researchers cautioned that ACR data is usually encrypted, so they could not confirm with 100% confidence that all observed traffic contained ACR information.