LG TVs’ integrated ads get more personal with tech that analyzes viewer emotions
LG TVs’ integrated ads get more personal with tech that analyzes viewer emotions
I recently bought an LG TV. I didn't connect it to the Internet, I just use it with my Chromecast or Switch. Works great, no ads, no AI BS.
Coming soon (if not already): TVs with utility cellular connections or corpo network (like Amazon sidewalk) access that your neighbor may have not opted out of.
I find it highly likely that TVs will soon cease to function without an internet connection, complete with some BS explanation about protecting your privacy or security.
I mean, a camera is an easy thing to block, as long as you're aware of it, understand the implications, and have the desire to block it. Just obstruct the lens. Roll of black electrical tape, put a strip over it, done. Now, most people out there may not actually do so...
Only becomes an issue if other services that you actually want are tied to the camera, or if the TV refuses to operate without a usable picture of the viewer or something.
Coming soon: a screwdriver and a soldering iron
a quick reminder that the 5G standard defined a peer to pear peer operating mode for smart devices
Luckily my neighbors are way out of WiFi range and there is barely enough cell service here to send a text from inside the house.
Some TVs already have the ability to connect to sidewalk. More worrying is that every newer "Smart" TV has the ability to cast to it so if anyone ever does that using an internet connected device like a SmartPhone then bam...your TV just got an internet connection and can now send out stored data and potentially grab a firmware update.
Surprise!
Hopefully no IBS either.
I've heard this line many times from so many people.
So basically just Nintendo and google profit off your personal information? And doesn't Chromecast serve ads? In the background, but still?
I fully support your decision to not connect your LG TV to the internet. I do the same thing but it's often just for convenience. I get better performance from my devices rather than from the TV itself for whatever application.
Just was thinking about that recently is all.
If they ever make this a standard feature in all TVs and make it where I can't just disconnect it from the internet, I will be using old TVs for the rest of my life.
My TV is there to display a visual output. It does not and should not do anything else.
Luckily digital signboards will always be an option to replace TVs with if the situation becomes truly dire. The sorts of no-frills displays corporations buy to display whatever media they want in store.
Might not come with sound, but you can pick up a cheap sound bar and it will still be better than whatever cheap speakers commercial TVs try to cram in there.
The future is great!
As long as my 1080p plasma tv works, there’s no need to upgrade. Going 4K would also mean I would have to upgrade my HTPC hardware, because that old APU probably can’t handle resolutions like that.
In the meantime though, I’ll just keep on watching online videos in my living room without ads or interruptions. It’s been great even though all of this hardware is cheap and ancient.
So what im hearing is never buy an LG TV. Got it.
I have an LG TV. Absolutely love it.
However, it’s not connected to the internet so it doesn’t do any of this shit. It’s just a really nice dumb TV that has the potential to spy on me if I ever gave it a chance to be smart, and I still get to take advantage of the various picture improvements that come from having the processing power of a smart TV.
Just need something else to do streaming if that’s what you want. Like an Apple TV, nVidia Shield, Roku, or game console. Some of those will also advertise to you, but I’ve had good experience with my Apple TV.
Continue to never buy LG products again?
Gotcha. The advertising works, i guess...maybe not how they wanted to, though lol
I'm about to live in a camper full of paper books. I hate everything tech has done in the last twenty years.
I would make an inappropriate Ted Kaczynski joke if I didn't know everything we do is being constantly monitored at all times by a bunch of turds with zero sense of humor.
Even Hannah Montana Linux?
Counterpoint, we have the Cosmic Desktop (or at least an alpha for it) and tbh its pretty cool :3
Can we please ban electronic advertising already? And billboards? Society would be better off without them.
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.
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.
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
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.
Let's be honest: I, as a customer, want to make informed buying decisions. I want to buy food that is tasty and maybe is healthy, but not based on some image that some marketing guys want to push. I want to choose the car which is best (and cheapest) for my purposes, and don't want to be hearded into buying something else. I want to choose the best insurance for me and not be mislead by some emotional ad showing me a happy family.
And I really do not want to be manipulated in an emotional vulnerable moment so that I buy something. That's shady as fuck
Enshittification in progress. Sadly their OLED TVs are amazing, if not for the intrusive ads. It is really crap what all those companies are doing shoving ads our throats.
I am trying to block everything using ad blockers, DNS filtering, Pi hole, etc.
I just... don't connect the TV to the internet. Never had an issue with anything like that.
This is the best way, really. Generally, you have much more control over what you plug into it.
A display shouldn't have anything even approaching what can be called an 'OS' on it. Yet here we are.
Sometimes even that's not enough. I've had some questionable kit before that would just ignore the DNS settings fed to it if it thought they were no good, and fall back to something else preconfigured.
pfSense is a wonderful tool for situations like that. Anything intended for local use only here just doesn't get outside at all. Handy for stuff like a fire stick that only needs to be calling up a local media library.
It can also mangle any DNS requests going out to a different server and redirect them to itself instead. You could do this without it with iptables/nftables on a generic Linux box, but pfSense makes it much friendlier.
There are other packages that can do the same, but physically all you need is one piece of hardware as a bouncer that manages connections between inside/outside.
I got an LG OLED a few weeks ago. Hands down the best TV screen I've ever owned.
Fuck knows what the stock OS does because I've only watched Apple TV through it.
This tech has been in TVs easily for the past ten years.
Did you know this stuff is in most modern cars, too? Fuck. EVERYTHING listens to you now.
I hate to use this phrase, but, back in my day, we used to call this SPYWARE and it was treated as a virus - it was highly unacceptable by people.
This is still your day
We're on the cusp of the panopticon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
The framework for an authoritarian tech surveillance state is in our pockets.
Luckily, not if you actually read the article. The headline is misleading. "Emotional advertising" is a marketing gimmick term by LG for guessing your personality from the shows you watch.
So we pay them to do this to us? I stopped putting tv's on the internet once I realized it offered me nothing useful. Firmware is about it and if that's the case I'll either usb it or put it on the internet for 5 min to do the update. Even then Samsung sucks so much with firmware the release notes for every single update are "bug fixes and improvements"... thanks Samsung.
If I am forced to put it online or it comes up with a way to phone home on its own, I am done buying those kinds of tv's, and I'm sure some other brand will offer one that doesn't, even if it isn't the best one to buy.
most firmware releases will be to fix something with the online service anyway. If it displays stuff coming down a wire from your PC when you buy it, it probably never needs an update.
I will say I had 1 time i needed it. It was my Samsung Odessey monitor. It supports freesync but I noticed when it was on there would be a slight flicker. Dealt with it for probably 2 years before looking into it. Low and behold online comments all said firmware fixed it. It worked, fixed it and now it's been fantastic ever since. One of the only times an update on a screen did something amazing. It's not the norm but the excception.
This is why you block the camera with a little diorama that shows a single white male viewer...frantically masturbating.
Close. This is why I mastubate frantically infront of the cameras. It satifies they kink for surveilance and my kink in exhibitionism.
It's really an ecosystem, if you think about it
Wait, TVs have cameras now? That sounds super creepy
And an array of microphones. But it's not like they have a clear view of their surroundings. Wait
As if someone published a book featuring this very technology...in 1949.
It was noted with memes when the ToS of one such television suggested not having private conversations in front of or otherwise near the TV screen.
Good idea, though, this isn't actually about cameras watching you as the title looks like.
Yep, this is just a standard market segmentation.
Simple solution I use: Fuck television sets, get a computer monitor and basic speakers instead. A display should do only one thing and do it well.
That would certainly be ideal, although there's great difficulty in finding 50"+ monitors, and they cost a huge amount more
I guess that would beg the question, how much is it worth to you pay extra to not have additional spyware in your home? Or as others have said in this thread, there is at least one brand of television that still sells dumb tvs.
Look at commercial sets
Open up the tv, de soldier the led.
if your router is able to you can set up ACLs to allow the TV access to your network but not the internet.
If you set up your pihole as the DHCP it works. It's weird that you can't change the static IP...
but now that Roku has pop up ads for simply moving around the app menu
Huh? I have 3 Roku Ultras, a Roku Stick, and a Roku TV and none of them do that. Have you gone into the Roku settings menu recently and checked your advertising settings?
I was describing this to my partner and she thought i said "LGBT". Yes. The LGBTQ community created this technology and weaponized it. Next on Fox News.
that was always my beef with ads, they just didnt speak to me on an emotional level
Yes, it's always nice to feel like my ads get me, you know? Its important to have a meaningful relationship with your ads.
HOW EXCITING...
said no one ever.
Never connect your tv to WiFi
Don’t buy connected anything
Just buy things that do the thing you want.
No consumer ever asked for a smart tv
If it makes a sound you don't recognise, use the gun.
The printer lol
For the lower tech people, smart TVs are just OkAy. They allow an end user to use Netflix etc. It's the fucking cameras mics and sensors illls in my Tv that's fucked up
Smart TVs are tools of the demiurge
I’ll never connect a TV to the internet again.
This is actually about analysing the shows you watch, so it's invasive, but not insidious in the way, say, the screenshots of hdmi content is.
That's okay, it will just autoconnect to any other LG device in bluetooth range, which has a working internet connection. Like, the neighbour's TV on the other side of your wall.
Sheesh…
So glad I'm not in the market for a new TV
if it's anything like the other ai features they offer, it will be garbage and never work and slow everything down
And use 10x the electricity to get this slop.
Rather have a TV from 1999. Hope LG goes under.
You know back in the day they were like easily half a dozen custom Android ROMs for any given phone. I'm pretty sure that there's still a diversity of ROMs available.
Why is this not the case with televisions?
Because there's no easy way to install it. TVs don't usually have a data transfer usb-c port.
TVs generally don't come with unlocked bootloaders. That shit is locked down big time.
I wish there was a TV with absolutely no built in smart features and a slot in the back for a compute module (like a RP CM5).
Or just a few Display Ports and HDMI
Someone once said on here that NEC made TVs like that but I couldn't find anything
Not sure where to find them, but I did see this video awhile ago about them
They call them projectors. They're just way too expensive to be reasonable replacements for the average user.
I got an Optoma projector for the bedroom that I love. It's about $1000 USD. Is that on the high end? I guess. I'd call it medium. But I know many people that spend that much and more on their TV. Works pretty well even in day/with the light on, obviously far better with the room darkened, and even has a gaming optimised mode.
Oh no, "smart projectors" are definitely a thing.
If you want a serious mind fuck read "stand On Zanzibar" a science fiction novel from 1969.
One of the things that the writer predicted was Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere, a gimmick where your TV would insert your family into advertisements.
The novel is full of other, equally accurate predictions...
My LG OLED has never seen an internet connection and intend to keep it that way for a very long time: indefinitely.
Same. I have a C3 and it's awesome. It has this feature where when you turn it off it has this nice subtle clock screensaver thing but it always shows the wrong time due to not having an internet connection.
The TVs are reporting a lot of anger. Add more cameras!
This sucks.
You should drink another verification can.
Bro my body can’t take it anymore, I’m so sick. I’ve had 23 Mountain Dews and 14 Doritos Dew It Right today. My LG tv still wants me to sing and dance to continue.
"Gee, boss. Says here 87% of viewers were angry with the TV for spying on them."
I just don’t connect the snoopy bastard to my network 😂
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.
God, I wish we kept our CRT.
My friend still has his. Let me tell you, that thing has a presence.
Are there any TV manufacturers out there that do great screens like the lg ones, but without all the rest of the bullshit?
We are in the market for a huge TV soon, and we were looking at the lg oled Evo. However I don't really like rewarding bad behaviour, so if there's any others you can suggest then suggest away...
For what it's worth, I subscribe to the "use your TV as a screen, plug another device in to deal with content" method. It's not connected to the network.
So, whatever my TV wants to do, I'm not using it's janky apps that might get slow over time or try to advertise to me - my Nvidia shield (which is on the ropes/way out due to some updates it pushed) CEC wakes the TV and plays content without having any particular insight into my emotional state. But I can replace that relatively easily/cheaply until my screen literally stops working, rather than if some new service isn't supported on it or an old one is deprecated.
I'm being tempted to replace the shield with a NUC or other device due to the updates I mentioned above - but I can probably replace the launcher more easily.
You're still rewarding bad behaviour. They still put all the crap on and made the sale anyway.
I've been planning to do the same thing when our current batch of TVs kick the bucket. But I was going to use an appletv, not a NUC, because all of the streaming services only serve 2k through browsers but their apps can get 4k+. And for the rest I'll run jellyfin and serve from my home media server. The TV will never see the a valid internet connected network.
Recently my roku tv started showing a blaringly loud auto-play ad on the homepage once every 2-3 weeks. FUCK THAT.
My lg tv is honestly the best tv i have ever owned. I have 0 complaints, my old house got flooded a few years ago and the tv soaked up a good amount of water and after some running time, it went back to working flawlessly.
But i would never connect that fucker to the internet.
Exactly this. I love my LG, but it doesn’t get internet privileges.
As much as I loathe Samsung for many of their practices, there are options if you look for Commercial signage or hospitality tvs
Maybe Panasonic or Philips they use LG OLED panels. I don’t know if they spy or not but worth investigating. Or Bang and Olufsen if you are swimming cash.
I’ve heard that Sceptre is a good brand for that
So glad I haven't got a LGtv, I'd have to buy a sledgehammer as well.
Ahw fuck, wasn't LG like the last reasonable tv brand out there?
What should invuy if i want a new good 4K TV?
A book.
Sceptre TV
I've seen this linked before, and unfortunately the specs are very mediocre on their TVs. I don't know how they can claim a TV is HDR when it has a meh contrast ratio, no dimming zones, and can't even do 100% of the sRGB color space.
I don't know how much of the price of other TVs are subsidized by ads, but these Sceptre TVs are pretty bad value when looking at panel specs alone.
Panasonic, or some of the European brands are good. Or you buy the largest 4K computer monitor that can afford.
Jokes on them, I have facial paralysis!
Brb going to sell life size lego faces to lg owners...
I want one too! Only because I love Lego 😆
I see a lot of concern in this thread that future TVs would just peer-to-peer or cellular connect to do their dastardly functions. Wouldn't this be preventable by putting a fine wire mesh around the box on the rear of the panel? Sure, the signal could still go out through the panel, but that's bound to incur a lot of interference from the panel itself, right?
Chances are they'll have some antenna line going to the edge of the TV. The box on the back of the TV already has a bunch of shielding over it inside. If you were to go to the trouble of opening the TV to find it, you may as well disconnect the antenna and ground it so there's no chance of a signal.
I have a Kurig coffee maker (too little respect to spellcheck their name). It puts out a BLE beacon that I can receve a mile away. Its hard to know what that bugger is doing. G-force was right!
it's looking for other keurigs to mate with, like a barnacle
Hopefully the TVs don't won't require that connection to operate.
They'll have to pay for the cellular connection themselves because I'm not gonna enter my wifi password into the tv lol. Been using a pc hooked up to the screen for ages. Screw "smart tv" features, slow and inconvenient as hell.
The inconvenience creared by their greed. You buy a tv, a PC, internet and a netflix sub but you cant watch full (shite) resolution unless you are in a native app.
Piracy is the way forward.
I have an lg tv that has never seen the internet. It runs on a shield with kodi. With that being said, fuck shield and their ads
Yeah that part blows ass. My solution for now is an appletv. They at least don't shove ads down your throat and their main business models are not based on collecting user data for advertising or databroker purposes (looking at you, google).
I got a Samsung TV a couple of years ago. I use it with a Roku. It's not on my network. I'll keep it until it stops working because I think eventually TVs will refuse to work without an Internet connection.
At that point I'll just buy a monitor.
but why
Sad people buy more to try to make themselves happy. Retail therapy.
People who serve ads have a vested interest in knowing when you're unhappy and what makes you unhappy, so they can capitalise on it.
Cool one more reason I’ll never connect my display to the internet.
umm guys this isn't a news article, it's a Black Mirror episode
This is why I switched to sceptre, they're good quality, low cost, dumb displays.
Viewer emotions will anger and frustration at their ads.
No.
NOPE
Blocked all this crap at the network level. Don't get any ads now.
with a pihole they can easily work around, or proper network isolation?
Nope.
Don't like that.
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.
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.
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.
Yikes, don’t ever wank in front of your TV.
Or wank lots in front of the TV. Make the collected data useless.
I still use a dumb TV, and I will for as long as possible. I'll never buy a new TV ever again. only used from Facebook. most stuff I only watch on my computer anyways.
I make my smart TVs dumb. No internet connectivity.
That is my solution as well for now. I bet TVs will start to come with cellular chips soon though.
Does anyone make a living room sized Faraday cage?
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.
For now, most of the ad bullshit can be turned off. Though it turned back on after the latest software update and forced me to spend another 10 minutes digging through the horrendous settings menu.
Lucky Cream and Goldstar (the L and G in LG) would be ashamed of this.
Verification can
I agree, but with TVs (or large displays" we're at the point where there are no good options. Commercial displays are over engineered for the home and lag in technology Vs home TVs. So they're not an option. Lg and Samsung are the display technology leaders, but their TVs are full of crap— so no. Monitors don't go large enough for the living room.
Guess I'm stuck with what I have.
Monitors are still bigger than TVs our parents had in our childhood, no way I'm buying such a surveillance machine just for a bigger screen.
Here, take it:
)Why would you ever accept this anti consumer bullshit for a slightly better screen? It might not even take a year before the current cutting edge not "the best" anymore with how fast tech cycles. I would absolutely go out of my way to get a device I can deprive of an Internet connection and still use.
This Samsung is out of stock, but there are options. You just need to look for signage displays or hospitality tvs.
Huh, I've heard that commercial displays are the way to go. What do you mean when you say they are over engineered?
Get a projector. Cheaper, bigger display area, less obtrusive.