Discovered games on LG TV allow TV to be used as a proxy by others.

[pcspeaker]

My 6yo has started playing very simple games on the TV using the remote control. There are classic arcade clones, chess and some more modern 3D games. Everything is very unbranded and basic, which made me suspicious. I had to factory-reset the TV at some point, and this meant I saw the privacy policy/T&Cs page for these games (that my son would normally skip through). Reading them, I saw a reference to something called Bright Data.

In our house we run NextDNS, which blocks intrusive ads (in fact it's great at removing the cr*p on the homepage of the Smart TV). I was curious about Bright Data so looked them up, only to find them advertising their 'proxying' and 'scraping' services very proudly. I wasn't sure it was the same company so I checked the NextDNS logs to see if they appeared. They were top of the list of most-blocked destinations. Meaning, NextDNS was blocking thousands and thousands of outbound requests from the TV out to the internet, including at times when no-one was playing games or even using the TV.

Short version of what I discovered: This company has placed free games on the LG app store that, when installed, turn your smart TV into a proxy server that is then used as a VPN tunnel for their customers. In other words, you are having other, anonymous people's internet traffic routed through your home, and there's zero control or regulation of that traffic.

For a "you are the customer" moment, they advertise their "residential proxies" and attract reviews for the service: https://multilogin.com/blog/bright-data-review/

Others have noticed this, too (www.reddit.com/r/VPN/comments/1983e7l/free_vpns_reselling_user_bandwidth/) but I wanted to post here because these games appeal to kids, and they're never going to read Ts and Cs.

Beware!

Meh. Just presume anything online is not free and not secure .

Sage advice, but not realistic to be expected of children.

You can turn the adverts on the homepage off in the settings.

Like @RobertplantgoddessI have always thought that things like that are only available for reasons of getting something from you, otherwise they wouldn’t have games etc. My kids only ever played games on a Nintendo DS. I’d rather pay for games and know what they were doing.

I don't follow your logical path that people will (or should be expected to) think that something being provided for free means a backdoor will be opened into their residential Internet connection so it can be used by others, without their knowledge. Happy to be corrected about that but I suspect most people have absolutely no idea this is happening.

I would have expected there to be something in it for the developer, yes. Nothing is free with games like these.

I would also expect if something was free at the point of the user they were getting money elsewhere. Maybe not routing traffic through the device but definitely data harvesting.

How old is your child, should he be being left to download stuff himself?

That’s really shocking. I can’t believe it’s legal. I would have thought that LG would vet the games and ensure their security. This is like them intentionally bundling a Trojan/worm with their televisions.

I agree - I expect some collecting of data and ads, which is why we have nextdns. And it stopped this proxying from happening. Ads and data are one thing, this is another.

Are the games preloaded by the TV manufacturer? If yes then I wonder if they are aware of it too.

I wouldn't like other people being directed through my personal router either. That's perfect for hacking.

Thank you for the information!