Portugal’s consumer association Citizens Voice has asked the country’s courts to examine LG’s smart TV data collection, a legal push that has put smart TV privacy back in front of regulators. The organization is calling for multiple smart TVs to be taken off sale and for others to be updated to protect viewers’ privacy, and it wants judges to weigh LG’s public statement against findings published by the technology title TEK Notícias. The action was reported on November 6 by TechRadar.
Citizens Voice asks judges to test LG’s response
According to TechRadar, Citizens Voice wants the Portuguese courts to investigate and determine whether the data collection breaches consumers’ rights. If the courts find that it does, the association wants action taken not only against LG but against retailers as well.
The request centres on what the consumer group says LG’s statement left out. TEK Notícias reported that the statement did not directly explain tests involving audio storage when the TVs were offline, nor did it address named security vulnerabilities in webOS, LG’s smart TV operating system.
The "216,000 spy TVs" allegation LG denies
The dispute traces back to September, when a report accused LG of creating "216,000 spy TVs". LG denies the allegation. TechRadar reports that the denial has not satisfied Citizens Voice, which is now pressing for court scrutiny of the company’s account.
LG is unlikely to be the only manufacturer following the case closely. TechRadar notes that other smart TV makers will be watching the Portuguese action with interest, and that other consumer advocates are likely to be paying attention too. More coverage of consumer technology disputes is collected in our News section.
Northeastern University tested 12 sets for ACR activity
The Portuguese case lands alongside a separate piece of research into how smart TVs handle tracking. Watching the Watchers, an analysis of US smart TVs and their automatic content recognition (ACR) activities, was carried out by researchers at Northeastern University and covered by The Verge. ACR is the feature that identifies what is being shown on screen.
The researchers summarised their goal plainly:
"2% of U.S. households have a smart TV that can take snapshots of whatever is on screen and report them back. We measured where that data goes, and whether turning the feature off actually stops it."
The team tested 12 different commercial TVs across multiple brands and platforms, including Samsung’s Tizen OS, LG’s webOS, Roku OS, Google TV, Fire TV, VIDAA and Smartcast OS.
Opt-outs that "fully worked" on four platforms
The majority of the sets were, in TechRadar’s description, well behaved: they only used ACR on their own streaming services, respecting the no-ACR stances of Netflix and other third parties, and they offered users an opt-out for ACR.
But the opt-outs themselves did not hold up everywhere. The researchers found that the controls only "fully worked" on four platforms:
- webOS
- Google TV on Sony
- VIDAA OS
- Fire TV OS
On Samsung sets, 30 out of 30 test runs using Samsung’s own TV streaming service showed "traffic consistent with ACR" when the company’s own streaming channels were used, despite ACR having been switched off. On Vizio, 100% of opted-out runs appeared to make no difference at all: every run "still sent traffic to its Amazon Kinesis ACR endpoint, with no decrease".
Encryption limits what the smart TV privacy study can prove
The researchers attach an important caveat to those findings. ACR data is usually encrypted, with VIDAA OS the exception, so they cannot say with 100% confidence that the data transmitted on every platform is definitely ACR information. As TechRadar puts it, the best they can do is say that it certainly looks like it.
The headline conclusion, the outlet writes, is that opting out might not opt a viewer out completely, or at all, depending on which smart TV they own. Fuller detail is set out in the researchers’ paper. Our Reviews section covers the television platforms named in the study.
A reporter’s prescription for smart TV privacy
TechRadar’s Carrie Marshall, who has been writing about technology since 1998, framed the Portuguese case as part of a longer pattern. "It seems to me that this is another example of tech firms’ overreach running up against consumer advocacy and privacy legislation: as a former EU resident I’ve spent many years reporting on tech firms batting heads with regulators over data usage and privacy," she wrote.
Her suggested remedy for manufacturers was short. "And it seems to me that there’s a simple solution for smart TV makers: be up-front about what data you’re using and what you’re doing with it, and make sure opting out means exactly that. It’s probably a lot cheaper than going to court," Marshall wrote.
For now, the immediate decision sits with the Portuguese courts, which have been asked by Citizens Voice to rule on whether LG’s smart TV data collection breaches consumers’ rights, and whether retailers share any responsibility. LG maintains that the allegation made against it in September is untrue.
