Another day, another Ken Paxton lawsuit, this time against smart TV manufacturers he accuses of illegally spying on Texans.
“Smart TVs are watching you back.”
That’s how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opens a series of new lawsuits accusing major television manufacturers of secretly surveilling Texans inside their own homes.
Paxton has filed suit against five major television companies—Samsung, Sony, LG, Hisense, and TCL—alleging they unlawfully collected and monetized detailed viewing data from consumers without meaningful knowledge or consent. Two of the companies named in the lawsuit, Hisense and TCL, are based in China, a fact Paxton says raises additional concerns about data security under China’s National Security Law.
According to the lawsuit, the companies embedded Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology into their smart televisions. The software allegedly captures screenshots of what appears on a user’s television screen as frequently as every 500 milliseconds, allowing companies to monitor what consumers watch across streaming platforms, cable television, and even external devices connected by HDMI, such as gaming consoles or laptops.
Taking a picture every half-second and uploading it sounds something that would definitely show up in your router logs, assuming you have things set up to keep an eye on it. And I rather doubt Samsung or LG have much use for that data clogging up their servers.
But the Chinese manufacturers? Yeah, I can see them intermittently sampling everything until they find a nice juicy target to turn on and aim the full spyware capabilities at.
The attorney general’s office alleges that the data is transmitted back to the companies in real time, used to build detailed consumer profiles, and then sold or shared for targeted advertising purposes—often without consumers understanding what they agreed to or how the technology works.
“Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Paxton said in a statement. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.”
I wonder if the spyware capabilities Paxton alleges are present in these TVs can be easily demonstrated. I wouldn’t put it past China to include some capabilities, but demonstrating that they’re actually present in something like a court of law might prove difficult.
Maybe LG and Samsung are spying on you to sell you ads:
Kneon at Clownfish TV reports that LG TVs are automatically installing Microsoft Co-Pilot AI, and that it listens to your conversations are serves you ads based on it…
Tags: AI, China, Clownfish TV, Communism, Ken Paxton, LG, Microsoft, Samsung, technology, Texas, Texas Scorecard, TV
I generally like Paxton but he seems to be doing a lot of stuff that is designed to get him into the news, rather than to help preserve the American way of life in Texas. I could be wrong but it reminds me of a right wing version of Washington state’s Bob Ferguson who spent four years suing the Trump Administration before becoming Governor of Washington.
So has anyone written a good open-source firmware for smart TVs, to preclude backdoors and snooping on users?
They can’t spy on you unless you supply an internet connection. If you’re watching internet TV, you were being spied on by the service, signed-in social accounts, and your ISP, so adding a fourth spy service doesn’t seem like too much.
@bravokilo, that’s a meaningful contribution, but perhaps at least you could gain control of who is spying on you! You might at least gain a functional user interface!
I don’t have a specific article to point to, but that is my understanding of how Smart TV’s work. It’s not clear how often or how much of the TV screen image is captured, but enough to ascertain what is being viewed.
That information can be used to target advertising across all platforms.
I don’t have a streaming subscription or cable. After watching a military documentary from my hard-drive, Amazon started suggesting other military documentaries. I don’t watch many military documentaries. It could be coincidence, but it seemed suspicious.
Google and Amazon are built on consumer information. LG and Samsung might have wanted to get in on that.
The TV user agreement will probably shield LG and Samsung, but Paxton is bringing attention to this issue. You are smart people, but doubt that this is happening. We will find out.
“would definitely show up in your router logs”
I am not smart, but muddle through. I check my cable modem log pretty often to see why my internet drops out. For home automation purposes, I have poked around in my router setup. I don’t know what would look nefarious in my router logs.
Oh, smart TV companies (at least those outside China) are definitely tracking your viewing to serve up ads, but they’re doing it using metadata attached to what you’re watching, not doing snapshot pictures and running it through some sort of AI engine to detect what you’re watching. Too bandwidth intensive.
I’ve heard of instance of people saying something aloud and then having devices serve up ads related to something the swear they never searched. Maybe. But there are also metadata answers there if they’ve ever searched for that thing on another device linked to an ad profile account (i.e., Google or Facebook).
My guess is that this is something Loius Rossmann has people working on.