This is completely unacceptable. We have reached the point where you can purchase a television for your own home, pay for the television with your own money, put it in your living room, and discover that the damn thing may be capable of collecting information about you, your network, the devices around you, and what you are watching. An investigation by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers found LG televisions scanning local networks for phones, smartwatches, computers, and other devices, collecting information about nearby Wi-Fi networks, location and IP information, and using Automatic Content Recognition to identify what appears on the television, including content coming through HDMI. Researchers also reported finding evidence of microphone audio being captured while a television was in standby and stored locally while offline.
LG acknowledges that its televisions can scan for compatible devices on the same network, describing this as ordinary smart-TV functionality, and says its ACR advertising feature is opt-in. Researchers nevertheless demonstrated just how much information modern televisions are technically capable of seeing around the household. LG Ad Solutions boasts of reaching hundreds of millions of “addressable secondary devices,” and LG advertising executives have used phrases such as “we own the glass” when describing the company’s relationship with the television screen. Excuse me? You sold me the glass. YOU DO NOT OWN IT AFTER I BUY IT. That mentality is precisely the problem with the modern technology industry. You think you are purchasing a product. Increasingly, corporations look at the product as a permanent doorway into your life.
I have written extensively about Flock cameras and the government’s expanding surveillance machinery. I have written about commercially available location information, license-plate databases, facial recognition, and the gradual destruction of privacy. Now look around your own house. Your television, refrigerator, doorbell, phone, smart gadgets, laptop, and any other device connected to the internet is capable of watching you.
People need to STOP accepting this as simply the price of modern life. That attitude is how freedom disappears. “Well, that’s just how smart TVs work.” NO! Why should it be? Why should a television need to know what other devices are sitting on my network? Why should an advertising business need to understand the entire “household” rather than simply display the program I selected? Why should I need to dig through privacy agreements and obscure settings to determine whether the screen sitting in my living room is analyzing what I watch? The burden has been reversed. Instead of corporations proving why they absolutely require information, citizens are expected to discover how to stop them from collecting it.
The argument that everyone agreed to this somewhere inside a terms-of-service agreement is equally absurd. Nobody reads 40 pages of legal garbage before turning on a television. That is not meaningful consent. It is a legal shield written by lawyers to protect corporations. If a device is going to monitor viewing behavior, identify devices throughout a household, process voice information, or transmit information for advertising purposes, the consumer should be told in plain English exactly what is happening and should have to deliberately turn those features ON. Privacy should be the default. Surveillance should require permission.
This becomes infinitely more dangerous when government enters the equation. Data collected for advertising today can become enormously valuable to government tomorrow. We have already seen government agencies purchase commercially available information rather than obtain it through the traditional warrant process. We have seen police departments construct enormous searchable networks of license-plate cameras. We have watched the line between corporate data collection and government surveillance become thinner and thinner. The government does not need to install a microphone in every living room if citizens voluntarily purchase internet-connected microphones themselves.
That is why the argument “I have nothing to hide” is so incredibly foolish. Privacy is not about hiding criminal behavior. Privacy means government and corporations have no inherent right to know everything about you. What books you read, where you drive, who visits your home, what you watch, what websites you visit, what political programs you consume, and what you say inside your own living room are nobody’s damn business.
The frightening part is how quickly people have been conditioned to accept this. Twenty-five years ago, tell someone that their television might scan the devices inside their house, analyze what they watch for advertising, connect that information to other devices, and contain microphones capable of responding while the screen appears off, and people would have called it Orwellian. Today they call it a “smart home.”
Corporations should not be permitted to turn products people purchase into permanent surveillance platforms buried beneath unreadable agreements. Government should not be permitted to obtain information indirectly that the Constitution would require it to justify collecting directly. Privacy protections need to catch up with technology because technological capability is advancing far faster than the laws written to restrain its abuse.
We should not accept a surveillance state as an inevitable fact of modern life. We should not accept that everything must collect data because everything now contains a computer. We should not accept cameras following our cars, phones following our movements, algorithms following our purchases, and televisions monitoring our homes simply because somebody tells us this is the future. If that is the future they are offering, then we have every right to reject it.