- United States
- Ariz.
- Letter
Pass comprehensive consumer privacy legislation. LG's smart TVs are recording household conversations, scanning home networks for connected devices, and uploading that data to LG's servers — even when the TV appears to be off. This isn't a hypothetical risk. Security researchers at Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs captured this happening in real time, including plaintext transcripts of conversations containing phrases like "my social security number is..." stored in device memory.
LG Ad Solutions claims data from 216 million LG smart TVs worldwide, including 49 million in the United States. That's 49 million households being surveilled in their own living rooms without meaningful consent or recourse. The only way to stop it is to physically disconnect the TV from the internet entirely. That is not a reasonable burden to place on consumers.
This is exactly the gap that federal privacy law needs to close. Consumers deserve the right to know what data is being collected, the right to stop it, and real penalties for companies that treat their homes as data harvesting opportunities. I want to see you champion legislation that makes this kind of covert collection illegal and enforceable.