HOW EXCITING…
said no one ever.
“Gee, boss. Says here 87% of viewers were angry with the TV for spying on them.”
Hell yeah. Emotionally raping people is super ethical
Can we please ban electronic advertising already? And billboards? Society would be better off without them.
If we ban people from “earning” over a certain amount, they’ll get round it through “gifts” or exchange in-kind or something, right? Same with ads. If we ban them, then product placement with plausible deniability will be rife, paid through essentially money-laundering methods, worse than it is now.
Buying a TV should be a one time cost. These companies trying to create a continuing income where none exists is just rampant greed. Don’t want to pay the cost of updating and distributing your software? The open source it and get back to making better TVs.
Yikes, don’t ever wank in front of your TV.
Or wank lots in front of the TV. Make the collected data useless.
LG TVs will soon leverage an AI model built for showing advertisements that more closely align with viewers’ personal beliefs and emotions. The company plans to incorporate a partner company’s AI tech into its TV software in order to interpret psychological factors impacting a viewer, such as personal interests, personality traits, and lifestyle choices. The aim is to show LG webOS users ads that will emotionally impact them.
“As viewers engage with content, ZenVision’s understanding of a consumer grows deeper, and our… segmentation continually evolves to optimize predictions,” the ZenVision website says.
Going beyond ads, if you start training AIs on human preference based on mass-harvested emotional data, I imagine that you can optimize output quite considerably. Like, say I have facial recognition being converted to emotional response data, maybe something like smartwatch pulse data, some other stuff, and I go train an AI to try to produce a given emotional output in a viewer. I bet that they can do a pretty good job of that. Like, maybe how to piss people off at a target in political campaigns, build an AI that has a potent ability to emotionally-manipulate and flirt with humans, or ensure that interest doesn’t waver in television content by determining at what points people have less interest.
Holy shit there were so many ads in that article that I just stopped reading. It sucks LG is going down this route. They make really nice displays but now I dont ever want to buy an LG tv if its spying on me to serve me these ‘better’ ads. Fuck advertising. Its turned into a complete monster
You can’t hardly even buy computer monitors without them anymore either. Every one of the higher end Samsung or LG monitors is starting to include “smart” bullshit.
You can probably just cover the camera with tape or smth.
it’s not talking about tracking emotions from looking at the viewer, it’s tracking the emotions in the script of the thing they’re watching, so it knows what they like.
Don’t connect a computer monitor to the internet?..
It gets its internet connection from the PC; both HDMI and DisplayPort allow this.
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I tried the YouTube app exactly once. Since then my TV doesn’t have an internet connection any more.
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It’s just the addition of “AI”. We’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. I used to work for an advertising data company over a decade ago, and they filtered all the ads for one of the big channels’ streaming services in exactly the same way just with regular algorithms rather than AI. It’s what would make ads for men’s razors appear in the middle of a soap opera at 11PM because it knew the user was a man getting home from the pub.
Sounds like you need an ad blocker. I didn’t see any ads on the article except text links that were relevant to the story, which arguably aren’t ads.
Yeah I could really use one. Do you have any recommendations of ad blockers that you like?
uBlock Origin on Firefox-based browsers.
Good that there’s Pi-hole or similar solutions. Have both LG and Samsung at home and if I see what Pi-hole drops and how talkative both vendor TVs are… bloody hell! Don’t use the stock functions anyway, Apple TVs are doing there job here so I took them offline a while ago. Anyway, the whole industry is turning into a completely wrong direction…
does not worth anything nowadays. they’ll just retry with 8.8.8.8, a DoH service or something else. pretty sure they can also do without DNS, like chinese cameras use connections that cannot be blocked with a hosts file because they are going directly to a preprogrammed IP
Works with both vendors if looking into Pi-hole‘s logs and once they should really hardcode the DNS or similar stuff here, the connection will be disabled (which is the best way to deal with this anyway apart from updating firmware if you use an external box).
Once they try to reach IPs directly (ECOVACS once did so) you may block those on a firewall-basis but everything depends on your needs, will and setup of course.
if pihole says its blocked, that does not mean your device does not also query another DNS server
and once they should really hardcode the DNS or similar stuff here, the connection will be disabled
but how’ll you notice that? that ads return? different subsystems of the tv might work differently
Once they try to reach IPs directly (ECOVACS once did so) you may block those on a firewall-basis
and how do you know what IPs to block? and then, a server on an IP could hold multiple services such that blocking it breaks multiple things.
I’m not here to tease you, but I really think that this might not be enough even today
Well, there is some work to do with identifying the device in your network (which shouldn’t be the problem) and monitor the connections over a specific time. When (as happened with ECOVACS) a single device frequently connects to DNS and HTTPS reaching a single IP belonging to this vendor, this is regulated quite easily with a proper firewall. Without the insights, this is (like you wrote) difficult to accomplish and yes, there may be false positives. Also separating those devices within an own VLAN could be part of a (individual) scenario.
Samsung mostly talks to specific hosts, LG does as well and searching for firmware triggers different targets. These are easy to find if you know what you‘re doing but this depends on setup and knowledge. It‘s a hare-and-tortoise-race though.
The safest way would be disabling the WiFi or LAN-connection if you don“t need any of the services shipped with the devices but while this may work for TVs, it may make your Vacuum Cleaner useless as the specific app for that device won‘t work anymore.
No.
Lucky Cream and Goldstar (the L and G in LG) would be ashamed of this.
Echoes back to the Facebook leaker
There’s no bar too low except that which receives continuous ceaseless push back against people who push things like this.
There isn’t enough push back to matter. So the bar lowers.
I still have and will continue to purchase TVs for as long as I can. Not smartTVs.
As a side note, I went to Best Buy and asked them about non-smartTVs. They literally said they had 2 models. A small, tiny TV and a larger TV which they did not have a model on the floor. They would have to bring it out or I would have to go the back.
So glad I haven’t got a LGtv, I’d have to buy a sledgehammer as well.
Viewer emotions will anger and frustration at their ads.
I rooted my 65" LG TV, and put a pi-hole in front of it.
How did you root it? All methods I’ve seen appear to require you to get it online first, usually to visit a website that does it for you (seems sketchy).
That’s true, but the root method is open source:
https://github.com/throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot
That said, if it does cause issues, there’s nothing saying I can’t just block it at my router.
