Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

LG Electronics make lots of things—appliances and office machines and entertainment gear. Their logo is clever, and features a circle with a G, a nose like an L, and one eye looking, the other (the G’s “knee”) winking. Their slogan is Life’s Good.

LG’s prices are very competitive. Comparable Samsungs cost more, as do many other brands. And LG’s quality is rated as quite good, in most reviews I have seen.

Samsung and LG both have a line of Smart TVs. LG’s are smarter than we knew.

Gazing into the countenance in the logo, the broad and knowing smile, the open eye round and unblinking, the winking one broad and amused, I feel like Red Riding Hood. “But LG, what big eyes you have!”

“The better to spy on you, my dear,” murmurs LG reassuringly.

Here is New Egg’s blockbuster deal of a 42-inch Smart TV, coyly offered as “See price in cart.” They don’t want to brag, you know. So I put one into the website cart, and see that it costs $529, down from $599, and only today.

Not today. That TV would be too dear for me. And too smart.

In the past few days the South Korean company has admitted that its smart TVs have phoned home with info about what viewers view.

You thought the CBS eye was spooky? These TVs have tracked what we watch.

Who knew TVs could look back at us? Okay, you knew, Smarty, but the rest of us never suspected. Even after we learned a few years ago that some laser printers put a code on every sheet, one we would not see, that could be decoded to tell the feds (and who knows who all else) what printer, whose printer, at what location, deposited the toner on each page and melted the polymer beads to keep the toner on the paper.

Cue Bob Seger. They lookin' back, They lookin' back. Too many people lookin' back…

Who, the NSA? The CIA, the FBI, the IRS? For whom does our very own TV collect data about us?

Cue Jim Ed and Maxine Brown’s song from a century or two before Bob Seger. Or however long the 1950s were before the 1970s.

I was looking back to see
If you were looking back to see
If I was looking back to see
If you were looking back at me.
You were cute as you could be
Standing looking back at me
And it was plain to see
That I'd enjoy your company.

And what all is that !!#@%^$&*!! TV looking at, and reporting? What we are eating? Who is with us? What we are wearing? They say they are recording only our viewing habits, but how do we know? They weren’t going to tell us anything, What does “viewing data” include?

What channel is selected, how long we watch it, for starters. Something like the Nielson reports we viewers used to fill out when we were selected for that privilege. But now our TVs may be connected to lots of other “smart” gear. A smart TV can report the names of  the files stored on the connected USB drives.

What is that, or are those, data used for? The Smart TV platform is supposed to deliver more relevant commercials and give us insight as to what other smart viewers are viewing.

That’s what LG told Graham Chuley in an email. He’s a security researcher who saw another researcher’s blog post. DoctorBeet, as that other researcher styles himself online, noticed and posted about this curious application of curiosity on the part of LG.

LG promised to release a firmware update that would respond to owners’ opt-out requests. If an owner notified the company, “I am not a narcissist. And if I want to post about myself and what I am doing and watching, moment by moment, I can use Twitter. I can take selfies with my cell and send them to all my friends. If I need to learn about other people’s fascinating habits, and have them apprised of mine, I can join Match.com”—LG would respond. Wouldn’t it?

So when users opted to deactivate the Smart TV’s voyeur features, how did that work? It hasn’t, yet.

Chuley says LG should apologize for tracking viewers, even after claiming that the company deeply respects its customers’ privacy.

Besides, says Chuley, LG’s surveillance arrangement was so lame it sent viewing data over the Net in plain text.

Smart TVs’ spying features are on by default, and most owners and viewers of LG’s Smart TVs didn’t (and probably still don’t)  know about those features. It seems LG does not plan on telling them, even now. Users will have to be proactive, and check for firmware updates once they are available. LG won’t provide them wirelessly, so owners will have to connect to the internet with Ethernet cables.

Doctor Beet also uncovered a “creepy corporate video” that told potential advertisers about LG smart TVs’ data collection capabilities. That video has been taken down. Heck darn! We wanted to look back to see how LG was going to exploit what it learned when it was looking back at us.

Life’s Good, LG, but sometimes folks are watching you when you least expect it—even when you have an expectation of privacy, or at least of being able to get away with violating that of your customers. Someday you will look back on all this and laugh. But for now, just quit looking back.