>this is going to be a massive business liability.
No. this is going to go "unnoticed" or at least unactioned. These are surveilance devices - compromising their value as source of surveilance is neither in the interest of industry (who are selling and buying the surveilance) or government (who are buying and acting on it). The age of shame is over. Current world goernments have flourished under the premise of being terrible, horrible, awful, evil enterprises that do bad for the sake of either being bad or enriching the bad - a consumer device with a ToS that says it will spy on you spying on people is nothing now. Laws be damned, because laws mean nothing now. These devices bery well may soon be the only lawfully available devices in the consumer market precisely because of their surveilance capabilities. Governments are reluctanty catching up to the capabilities of digital technologies, and they're finding them more useful now than ever before. We will be burning witches again before we ever prosecute tech companies for doing bad things.
>The age of shame is over. Current world goernments have flourished under the premise of being terrible, horrible, awful, evil enterprises that do bad for the sake of either being bad or enriching the bad - a consumer device with a ToS that says it will spy on you spying on people is nothing now. Laws be damned, because laws mean nothing now.
Spot on.
We must inculcate into our children and youth a supreme distrust of and skeptical eye for both government and corporations. They are both systems of resource acquisition and control, whose interests often come into conflict with the interests of the people. It is unfortunate that modern technology is being used in this manner, as it very well may lead to a destructive sort of neoludditism. Technology should be embraced, in the sense of teaching children how its composed, how it works, information security, privacy, etc. A child should not leave elementary school not knowing at all how to use an OpenPGP client or how to do very basic Linux system administration from the command line. Ignorance of technology's workings combined with the excitement for technology's consumer applications are the recipé for the normies' complacancy today. Maybe throw a few Steinbeck books out of the school curriculum to make room for this education?
I'm thinking less about shame, as corporations are dead to shame, and more about proof the TV stored a record of your bank details it got from text to speech.
If that's stored as text inside the TV and you lost money because it was copied by a hacker then you have a monetary value to show loss and a trail of liability you can use to sue LG.
> a trail of liability you can use to sue LG.
The average user would not realize LG was the reason, if they do they will loose more money and effort; LG's reputation and public image won't be even damaged enough for them to take a notice. You are an ant for them and ants are only powerful if they work together.
>I'm thinking less about shame, as corporations are dead to shame, and more about if you can prove the TV stored a record of your bank details it got from text to speech.
Then they'll get a joke fine, and continue as before. Maybe cut the price for a while, until they reintroduce it with another pretext a few years down the line.
And what will anyone actually do when they are bound by an arbitration agreement that prevents class action lawsuits and/or will find against the user because it's an arbitration agreement (with an arbiter that will bend knee and suck cock for the corporations and governments overseeing it - read Five Eyes[0] and Israeli espionage in the US[1])? Or are forced out of court due to the obscene cost of legal action in most nations due to lobbying efforts to protect corporations? Or never get to court due to said obscene costs, or even the simple knowledge of the ofence? Or are simply homeless because all of their money (their most recent paycheck) was stolen, and they are now derelict?
The legal systems that are in place (at least, those in the US) are not sufficient or even designed to act in any amount of favor of individuals. Even leveraging collective action (class action cases), most individuals are left worse off after judgement when they are wronged. Signalling that you are an affected class is effectively an admission of, at minimum, association - and worse guilt, of whatever an inteligence agency may suspect you of. Intelligence is not justice, and does not "protect" individuals under the same standards. If a government wants you to be wronged, they will accomplish it regardless of law, and the information they have regarding you will be leveraged as aggressively as possible. If you are simply wronged, the cost of accomplishing justice is often insurmountable.
In the most innocent case of wrongdoing by one of these surveilance devices, what would you, as an individual, do if your bank details were compromised as a result of a "smart" device exposing your credentials to bad actors? Obviously, you would contact your banking institution and try your best to rememedy the situation. But say, for example, this smart device is on your home network, has your login details, and possibly used your 2fa details because you used it to log in to your banking institution. That is You™. You logged in. You actioned something. It's verifiable because of your IP and your cookies and your 2fa code and the heuristics of your device usage (time of day, and the previous factors, and more). Many smart device applications already include SDKs that act as residential proxies - it's not impossible to believe that malicious ones may act as MITM or such. The possibility of 0Day expoloits or even backdoors can never be ruled out as you do not own these devices.
People should be subject to shame. Every government and every company are composed of people (for now) - these people are what action these possible futures, and who action the exploits of now. They are shameless by trade because that is their value. Much like the adtech industry thrives on the compromise of compensation to overcome the shame of doing wrong, so does intelligence and clandestine commercial exploitation. Money affords people the things that they want and need, which are becoming ever more impossible to acquire without succumbing to the shame of doing Bad Things™ to acquire it. You are never going to be able to sue LG because your bank details were leaked by a public DB or some other endpoint. Nobody will. Because the value of the information that LG provides to governments circumventing established anti-surveilance law (in the US, the 4th Amendment) through sales is worth more than any dollar amount it costs these parties.
Shame on every fucking one of you stains who implements this, if you can feel it, hidden in the walls of your owned property.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...