Major TV brand accused of snooping on customers while devices are supposed to be off
They say that Big Brother is always watching, but that feels more evident than ever in 2026. As technology continues to advance and we're surveilled for matters of national security, we might be unwittingly watched from unknown corners.
When not dealing with the uproar surrounding Flock Safety cameras supposedly being used by bad actors to snoop on us, our own gadgets and gizmos could be spying on us without our knowledge.
You might've heard about fears that your Amazon Alexa devices are listening to conversations they're not supposed to, while Apple settled a massive $95 million Siri privacy lawsuit. Elsewhere, everything from air fryers to robot vacuums has been accused of snooping.
Now, LG is under fire amid claims that TVs that are seemingly off have been recording audio of households while also accessing other local devices.
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In a lengthy investigation from Gamers Nexus (via Notebook Check), it's claimed that LG TVs continue to sweep home networks, map secondary devices, and record microphone audio, all while under the guise of being off.
Gamers Nexus' Steve Burke worked with Level1Techs and independent security researchers, maintaining that LG Smart TVs, including the flagship G5, have first-party ACR (automatic content recognition) functionality.
Burke reiterates that the fear is that these TVs "can pry into your personal life with greater precision than you might realize." He says that while shifting a TV is a one-time sale, selling data and advertisements or training AI continues indefinitely.
The video includes a recurring statement from LG Ad Solutions employees about 'owning the glass' rather than the customers. There are also marketing materials that refer to 'owning' the living room, and while LG likely doesn't mean it in such simple terms, Gamers Nexus points to user agreements that directly mention how a service partner called Alphonso Inc. can collect viewing information via ACR.
Things get more alarming when the video shows vulnerabilities in LG's TV software, with attackers potentially able to access microphone functionality and retrieve recordings or transcripts. Burke claims that audio can be captured through a TV's built-in microphone as well as other connected audio sources, going as far as demonstrating how audio can be recorded and retrieved via network connectivity.
For those who think it's simply a case of keeping your TV offline, the investigation suggests that this isn't enough to stop TV from collecting data locally and transmitting it when Wi-Fi returns.
Burke tells viewers: "The TV crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn't even know we were working on this."
Because of this, he loops it back to LG Ads Solutions’ claim that it knows about 363 million addressable secondary devices in the USA, despite only selling 216 smart TVs worldwide.
Even though there's the ‘you accepted the terms' argument, Gamers Nexus maintains that customers aren't properly warned about what they're signing up to when they set up their devices.
These worries apparently aren't new, as surgeon and privacy advocate Louis Rossmann pointed it out in a video about LG nearly three years ago.
Epic Games' Tim Sweeney has also taken issue with LG's app being automatically installed on monitors and displaying McAfee ads.
As smart TVs use broad network listeners and data sweeps, Gamers Nexus advised completely disconnecting sets from the internet and streaming via external devices only.
More than just highlighting LG's data-collecting capabilities and the advertising value this data could have, it's the security weakness exposing more sensitive information that Gamers Nexus is more concerned about.
UNILADTech has reached out to LG for comment.