The post “I’d not buy a LG monitor” by Beko Pharm drew my attention to this recent video by Gamers Nexus. Beko sums the video up nicely:

It reports about LG’s latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the software application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default and this thing starts – without consent – to display ads. It’s ToS also explicitly allows “wiretapping” and “eavesdropping” and it’s the user’s responsibility to obtain consent from anyone in the room.

Indeed, can you imagine that? I went ahead and looked up the LG Terms of Service, and sure enough, there’s this piece:

(…) the voices and utterances of third parties (including family members, guests, children, and bystanders) in the vicinity may be recorded and analyzed to provide the AI-Based Services.

i. CONSENT REQUIREMENT: You acknowledge and agree that it is your sole responsibility to obtain all necessary consents from any third parties whose voices may be captured by the Product and to notify household members and guests that their voices may be captured and processed (…)

The Gamers Nexus video already made fun of this, but indeed, LG expects you to greet your guests with something like “Welcome, welcome! Step in — unless, of course, you object to my TV recording everything you say while you’re at my place.” 🤦

Quoting Beko again:

I’d not buy a LG monitor again. And you shouldn’t too.

Couldn’t say it better myself. But in addition to just boycotting LG devices, consider asking innocent questions from your retailers, especially if they provide online forms for enquiring more info on their products: “Is this one of those models that installs adware on you computer?”.

(In a sense I have to be a bit grateful to LG, though, for making it easier for me to decide my new TV/monitor make when the time eventually comes. I’ve already settled for no Intel either.)