GoKawiilLG on Wednesday denied that its TVs eavesdrop on customers after a gaming site appeared to show that the TVs can be used to listen to conversations in real time.
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“The claims made in the recently published video are not true,” an LG representative said in a statement to CNET. The company said LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held or the TV’s “wake word” is uttered by the customer.
“Other than these instances, the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations,” the statement said.
The company said that if the device doesn’t recognize the wake word, no voice data is transmitted to the server, and that the wake word is detected locally and immediately deleted.
Gaming site GamersNexus reported earlier this week that LG TVs can be hacked by a third party to become listening devices, even if a user disables the onboard microphone.
GamersNexus says it used a man-in-the-middle attack on an LG G5 TV to enable it to listen to audio from a remote computer, and says the TV was able to record audio without the TV being connected to the internet. In a man-in-the-middle attack, the hacker intercepts sensitive data by putting itself in between two other entities, such as a user and a web application.
The 2-hour video, compiled with the help of the Level1Techs site, says that hackers could listen to a USB webcam or an HDMI input even when the physical switch located next to the mic was switched off. It said this alleged vulnerability was possible due to the TV’s Automatic Content Recognition feature, which transmits viewing habits and voice requests back to LG.
“LG TVs are able to be utilized as eavesdropping listening devices, in part because of the advertising functionality that’s built into them. We were able to retrieve plain text transcripts of a voice conversation and inputs from the TV,” the video says.
The video also reports that the researchers were able to see a list of the IP addresses of all the other devices on the network, even if those devices weren’t connected to the TV.
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