You think you're watching the TV? Now it's watching you too

In George Orwell's 1984, it was via the television set in every room that Big Brother was able to maintain near-total surveillance on the people of Airstrip One.

Now, a Yorkshire-based blogger has discovered that his new LG smart TV is keeping tabs on what he watches and sending the information to a server in South Korea.

The television, which is connected to the internet via the home Wi-Fi, was sending a message every time the channel was changed, according to the blogger, who goes by the name DoctorBeet.

Having noticed that the TV was displaying adverts tailored to his viewing habits on its home screen menu, he found "a rather creepy corporate video advertising their data collection practices to potential advertisers"

The video boasts that it "analyses viewers favourite programmes" to be able to offer advertising specific to different viewers, for example "sharp suits for men, or alluring cosmetics for women".

DoctorBeet found a menu option which appears to govern the collection of viewing data for use by advertisers: "In fact, there is an option in the system settings called "Collection of watching info:" which is set ON by default.  This setting requires the user to scroll down to see it and, unlike most other settings, contains no "balloon help" to describe what it does."

But further investigation proved that viewing data was being transmitted even when this option was turned off - including the name of the channel being watched, the precise time that you changed channel, your home country and most worrying of all, a unique device ID that could potentially be used to identify you through your television.

As DoctorBeet writes: "It turns out that viewing information appears to be being sent regardless of whether this option is set to On or Off."

The information sent was unencrypted, meaning it puts your personal information at risk of being intercepted by anyone on the same network, or easily picked up by hackers or any other third party - including other advertising companies or government agencies.

Smart TVs like the LG 42LN575V, built in May this year, that DoctorBeet was using are also capable of playing music or video files that are stored on your PC and shared over the network. He found that the TV was also sending details on which files were viewed to LG servers, including the file name itself.

At the moment, the data being sent to South Korean servers was being met with 404 error messages, meaning that at present, it doesn't look like LG is actively storing the information. According to DoctorBeet:

"However, despite being missing at the moment, this collection URL could be implemented by LG on their server tomorrow, enabling them to start transparently collecting detailed information on what media files you have stored.

"It would easily be possible to infer the presence of adult content or files that had been downloaded from file sharing sites. My wife was shocked to see our children's names being transmitted in the name of a Christmas video file that we had watched from USB."

[Your money or your documents: how hackers can hold your files to ransom]

The unencrypted nature of the transmissions means that even if LG isn't picking up the data at the other end, anyone listening in could be keeping a log of your viewing habits.

Having contacted LG Customer Service, DoctorBeet received the following reply. Yahoo UK is still awaiting a response to our request for a further comment from LG.

DoctorBeet was able to prevent the TV sending any more data by manually blocking the addresses of the LG servers in his wireless router - a solution that will be beyond many users, and one that only offers a temporary fix, as new addresses could be used at any time. As more and more devices in the home demand an internet connection, the potential volume of such data harvesting increases, and the idea of manually blocking each and every one will become impossible.

Researchers at NPD In-Stat predict that 100million TVs in Europe and North America will be connected to the internet by 2016.