LG's statement on the proxy ban is built to sound firm and commit to nothing
/Lorna Petrakis, nineteen years on the wire desk, reads LG's on-record statement to Krebs on Security for the press-release construction hiding inside a security story.
TL;DR: KrebsOnSecurity reported that LG will suspend smart TV apps running as residential proxy nodes, after research firm Spur found the SDKs embedded in more than 42 percent of LG webOS apps and over a quarter of Samsung Tizen apps, most of it routed through a network called Bright Data. LG’s on-record statement, from senior vice president John Taylor, promises the company is “working with developers” to remove the feature and that non-compliant apps “will be suspended.” Read closely, it’s built almost entirely out of unenforceable present tense and a threat with no date attached. Nineteen years on a wire desk teaches you to notice when a quote has been engineered to sound like an announcement while committing to nothing anyone could hold LG to later.
KrebsOnSecurity ran the numbers first: security firm Spur found that more than 42 percent of the apps available on LG’s webOS platform contain SDKs that quietly turn a customer’s television into an always-on residential proxy node, routing somebody else’s internet traffic through a device the owner thinks is just streaming their shows. Samsung’s Tizen platform showed better than a quarter of its apps carrying the same kind of code. Most of it, per Spur, runs through a single network called Bright Data. Those are real numbers from an outside researcher who counted something.
Then comes LG’s on-record response, attributed to senior vice president John Taylor: “A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended.”
I spent nineteen years reading galley proofs before they went to press for a wire service, which means I read that paragraph the way I read every quote that arrives too clean. Look at what it does. “Is not an intended use” puts the fault on how developers used LG’s platform, not on the review process that approved those developers’ apps in the first place. “Is working with developers to remove” is present continuous with no end date attached, no count of how many apps have been contacted, no count of how many have complied. And the threat at the close, these apps will be suspended, sounds like teeth until you notice it names no app, no date, and no number.
Compare that to the paragraph right before it, the one built out of Spur’s research. Forty-two percent. Over a quarter. One dominant network, named. That paragraph could be checked against something; a researcher could rerun the scan next month and confirm whether the figure moved. Taylor’s paragraph has nothing in it that could be checked against anything, ever, by design. Nobody drafts a statement that carefully and leaves the specificity out by accident. That kind of restraint gets built, not stumbled into.
This is the fingerprint I look for now more than any particular word choice: restraint. Not the restraint of someone with nothing to hide, the restraint of someone whose lawyers read the draft before the reporter did. A sentence like “a residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs” reads like plain, calm corporate English right up until you ask what it’s actually promising, and the answer sitting under it is nothing enforceable. It commits LG to “working with developers,” a phrase that could describe an email sent this morning or a task list nobody’s touched since spring.
Samsung doesn’t appear in the piece with a matching statement of its own, at least not one reproduced there, even though Spur’s research covers Tizen at close to the same rate as webOS. One company got asked, gave a quote engineered not to promise anything, and the story ran anyway, because “company working to remove the thing” is a sentence editors let through every week without circling it.
I circle it anyway. Nineteen years of proofs taught me the version of a statement that survives contact with a lawyer is never the version that tells you when the fix happens. Taylor’s quote will read, to most people skimming past it on the way to the Bright Data detail, like LG taking the problem seriously. It’s built to read that way. Whether a single app actually gets suspended, and when, isn’t in the sentence, and it was never going to be.
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