Smart TVs and our privacy – Are they snooping on us?

22-November -2013 
       

By iosphere curtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.nert

Electronics giant LG is investigating a claim by a British blogger that some of its smart TVs send information about the owner's viewing habits despite the activation of privacy settings.
The Hull-based IT consultant Jason Huntley wrote a blog claiming to have discovered that his LG model was sending data about his family's viewing habits back to the South Korean manufacturer.
Writing on his DoctorBeet blog, he said it appeared that unencrypted details about each channel change had been transmitted to LG's computer servers even after he disabled the option 'Collection of watching info' in the settings menu.
He said a flag in the data had been changed from '1' to '0' to indicate the user had opted out.
He then attached an external hard drive to the TV's USB slot, expecting that the screen might simply report that he had been watching material from an external device.
Instead, he found that the name of each media file stored on the drive, including photos labelled with his children's names, had been sent back to LG.He confirmed this had been the case by creating a mock video clip that he had named "midget porn", which had then showed up in unencrypted traffic sent back to LG, he said.
A spokeswoman for LG, the world's second-largest TV maker, said: 'Customer privacy is a top priority at LG Electronics and as such we take the issue very seriously. 'We are looking into reports that certain viewing information on LG Smart TVs was shared without consent.
This story brings the question is this the tip of the iceberg? How about the other Smart TV manufacturers? Do they also send unencrypted data to their servers exposing viewers privacy? We will keep you posted...  
see Jason's blog here: doctorbeet blog