LG Forces TV Owners to Use Microsoft ‘AI’ Copilot App You Can't Uninstall and Nobody Asked for
An Anonymous Coward writes:
If your product is even a third as innovative and useful as you claim it is, you shouldn't have to go around trying a little too hard to convince people. The product's usefulness should speak for itself. And you definitely shouldn't be forcing people to use products they've repeatedly told you they don't actually appreciate or want.
LG and Microsoft learned that lesson recently when LG began installing Microsoft's Copilot "AI" assistant on people's televisions, without any way to disable it:
"According to affected users, Copilot appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain LG TV models. The feature shows up on the home screen alongside streaming apps, but unlike Netflix or YouTube, it cannot be uninstalled."
To be clear this isn't the end of the world. Users can apparently "hide" the app, but people are still generally annoyed at the lack of control. Especially coming from two companies with a history of this sort of behavior.
Many people just generally don't like Copilot, much like they didn't really like a lot of the nosier features integrated into Windows 11. Or they don't like being forced to use Copilot when they'd prefer to use ChatGPT or Gemini.
You only have to peruse this Reddit thread to get a sense of the annoyance. You can also head over to the Microsoft forums to get a sense of how Microsoft customers are very very tired of all the forced Copilot integration across Microsoft's other products, even though you can (sometimes) disable the integration.
But "smart" TVs are already a sector where user choice and privacy take a backseat to the primary goal of collecting and monetizing viewer behavior. And LG has been at the forefront of disabling features if you try to disconnect from the internet. So there are justifiable privacy concerns raised over this tight integration (especially in America, which is too corrupt to pass even a baseline internet privacy law).
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.