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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

Yes, that is probably their reasoning.

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.

> 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.

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.