One day a British IT consultant, Jason Huntley, noticed advertising as he turned on his LG television set -- not ads during the shows or YouTube videos, but on the home screen, before he’d even started watching anything.
Huntley isn’t the only one who noticed this. The blog Ramblings by Mark Renney, of the Web design company WubbleYou wrote about what his TV was doing as well, and documented that the TV was logging filenames from the shared drives on his home network.
As the BBC notes, this activity could put LG in breach of UK law. Privacy protections in the European Union are stronger in some ways than in the U.S. and any data sharing requires informed consent. Since Huntley — nor anyone else, judging by the blog comments — was told about any of this before they bought the televisions (and thus couldn’t refuse the sale) there’s a real possibility that LG has run afoul of the law....