Because LG is a large corporation and if there is something we have learned (or had proven) in 2026 is that laws don't apply if you oligarch hard enough.
Actually LG is not just a large corporation or even a oligarch, it is one of the major south korean chaebol groups and therefore has way more power in the legal and political space.
IANAL but without concent I think LG is comitting a crime here. The owner who ostensibly agreed to obtain concent through the ToS might be breaking their agreement, but wouldn't that be a separate issue?
ToS and other click licenses have been making shit up for way too long.
A strong implication of this consent implicitly involves the device recording me when I tell the device to record me.
If the device is recording me all the time and silently uploading it, and I'm not aware, I can't give my consent. That's wiretapping, zero-person-consent.
Ask how you (or for that matter, a jury) would feel about your phone doing the same.
IANAL, but I believe the argument is that agreeing to the TOS constitutes consent. Even though no reasonable person would believe such a thing would be in the TOS and no reasonable person reads the full TOS (no person actually could...).
Perhaps we start suing one another for not disclosing the wire tapping, forcing the lawsuit upwards towards LG. It'd be more efficient to sue LG, but lawyers don't seem to be done those things. At least not that I'm aware of
IANAL, but only the owner can consent through the TOS. The owner does not collect or process the data, so it's entirely on LG to ensure proper consent, not the owner. Breaking a TOS is not a crime, and can only be punished by restricting or disallowing access to a service, but collecting personal data without consent is a huge problem in the EU.
It’s clearly unreasonable to assume that LG can know and procure consent from everyone you choose to allow into your living room.
It’s reasonable to push the burden of procuring that consent onto whoever controls entry to the space, with terms like this.
As a thought experiment, let’s take a service like Zoom where you can record video of participants. It’s reasonable to say “you’re operating the camera, if someone appears in the background, it’s your responsibility to make sure they’re informed and consent to the recording”. In fact, trying to establish the identity of the person in the background for the purposes of procuring consent is probably a greater intrusion on privacy than not.
The problem here is different. The problem is that the volume of data being collected is clearly unnecessary for achieving the purposes it’s intended for.
> It’s reasonable to push the burden of procuring that consent onto whoever controls entry to the space, with terms like this.
I don’t agree. I think if consent can’t be obtained, the only reasonable action here is to not collect the information.
The comparison to a zoom meeting is not 100% because if you’re walking past such a camera, you’re pretty likely to notice it and have the option to not step into view or obscure your face.
I think the legal argument would be that the owner of the recording device (in this case the TV) was informed and therefore responsible for informing others.
The question I think would centre on two things: is burying the information in a ToS acceptable for “informing” and is the amount of data collection proportionate for providing the service. I think the answers to both those is no.
I agree with your framing of the two problems, but I’d add a third: It is a large mistake to assume that the person installing the TV (thus agreeing to the ToS) is going to be present whenever it is being used around new people. It just assumes too much about the way people organize their lives, homes, purchases.
> It’s clearly unreasonable to assume that LG can know and procure consent from everyone you choose to allow into your living room.
If only they had a big interface to ask the user to push [AGREE] to consent to be spied upon. I would call it a RemoteVision and put the button in a wireless TeleControl so the user can easily agree every time they turn on the device.
We might not have the technological capabilities for this, but one can dream.
I<3ANAL but even if the owner agrees to the TOS, there’s no way other users or guests are verifiably consenting or any way for LG to verify before collecting data.
I could hit someone and say it was someone else’s fault, but delusion isn’t a legal defense.
Various courts have already invalidated clauses of click-through agreements that no reasonable person would expect to find in such an agreement.
Terms of service are not an absolute "I'm rubber you're glue" type shield against all possible accusations of wrongdoing, however much companies would love us to believe they are.
> Even though no reasonable person would believe such a thing would be in the TOS
Even if they did, it's a bad to let clickthrough TOS subvert laws and privacy. This idea that contracts can dismiss all other considerations needs to die.
Maybe? If they aren't we should change our laws so that they would be. We don't have to normalize or accept companies wiretapping and spying on people just because spying makes those companies more profit.
Is a tesla spying on you by default and uploading onboard audio and video? If so, yes definitely that is a crime.
If the Tesla is monitoring for whether you are awake behind the wheel and sounds the alarm without that information ever leaving the car, that is another thing entirely.
>> Somehow I doubt that after a war with China, satellites would be high on the priority list of things that need rebuilding.
If GPS goes down, most of our communications will go down. A lot of other stuff falls from there. I suspect we'd be OK after a brief adjustment, but it would be very disruptive.
These are bizarre assertions. GNSS is one way to navigate, and GNSS is one way to synchronize time-of-day. Communications networks are full of devices that don't have, or use, any GPS receivers at all. NTP, WiFi, DOCSIS, DSL, leased lines, servers, core routers, switches, desktops and laptops are all things that won't even notice that GPS was unavailable.
>> Similar formulas exist for moments, to compute the inertia matrix for a rigid body.
Fun fact. The inertia for any rigid body can be represented by 4 point masses forming a tetrahedron. If you diagonalize the inertia matrix, the coordinates of the 4 point masses can be (x, y, -z) (-x,-y,-z) (x, -y, z) (-x, y, z) where x,y,z are easy to calculate (I wrote this all down ages ago). You can also represent any point on the rigid body by its barycentric coordinates relative to those points. I believe an impulse can be applied, by finding the barycentric coordinates of the point its applied and using those coordinates to distribute the impulse to the 4 masses.
This is all really cool with one huge exception. The 4 points become coplanar for large flat objects, which means the z-height is really small for a piece of sheet metal for example.
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