Marrakech – A new investigation has found that current LG smart televisions record audio while appearing to be off, sweep home networks to map connected devices, and route the collected data to the company’s advertising business.
The findings come from a 135-minute video published by Gamers Nexus, which worked with hardware channel Level1Techs and three independent security researchers. The team spent more than 500 hours and about $70,000 testing retail LG OLED models, including the G5.
Packet captures taken through Wireshark showed the sets scanning the local network for unrelated hardware. That included phones, PCs, smartwatches, printers, switches, and smart-home devices. Using UPnP, a protocol that lets devices find one another automatically, the TVs mapped nearly everything on the network.
The sets also gathered internal IP addresses, the names and signal strengths of nearby Wi-Fi networks, and geolocation data. Much of that information flowed to LG Ad Solutions, the company’s targeted advertising arm. LG reports roughly 216 million smart TV sales worldwide, while its ad division claims access to 363 million secondary addressable devices in the United States alone.
Most tracking runs through Automated Content Recognition (ACR). The software samples on-screen audio and video, turns each sample into a digital fingerprint, and checks it against a reference database to identify what is playing. Testing showed ACR kept running even when a TV served only as an HDMI monitor for a laptop. Switching inputs did not switch it off.
The audio findings drew the most concern. In controlled tests, the TV captured clean microphone audio while the screen was dark and the set looked powered down. When the team muted the main microphone through the settings menu, a second, hidden microphone kept recording, untouched by the mute switch.
The team also unplugged a set from Ethernet, spoke near it, and watched it upload the stored audio the moment it reconnected. The microphone picked up speech from about 60 feet away, through a wall, and stayed live for 10 to 15 seconds after talking stopped.
Voice commands were converted to plain text and saved in on-device logs. In July, LG had told reporters its sets “do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations.”
Researchers also reported remote-code-execution vulnerabilities in webOS, still moving through responsible disclosure. One method fooled the TV’s browser into pairing with a fake mobile-device pop-up, handing over remote access without anyone touching the set.
The advertising strategy was explicit. LG Ad Solutions leaders were recorded describing the company as one that “owns the glass,” tying a household’s viewing to the phones and devices under the same roof.
That data runs through Alphonso Inc., the ACR partner LG took a controlling stake in during 2021. The division’s president of global ad sales, Serge Matta, previously ran Comscore, which the SEC charged in 2019 with inflating revenue by about $50 million; he paid a $700,000 penalty and accepted a 10-year ban from running a public company.
The report arrived four months after LG signed a privacy settlement with Texas. In May, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a deal requiring informed consent before collecting ACR data and a clear opt-out, following a December lawsuit that also named Samsung, Sony, Hisense, and TCL.
Yet Gamers Nexus found the “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” toggle still off by default. Days after the channel’s first LG report in July, the company added a forced-arbitration clause to its terms, blocking buyers from suing in court or joining a class action. LG’s television and account agreements now run past 30,000 words combined, roughly three to four hours to read at an average pace.
A separate concern surfaced through security firm Spur, which found residential-proxy code in about 42% of apps on LG’s webOS store, according to Krebs on Security.
LG has not responded to requests for comment. The researchers recommended disconnecting the sets from the internet and using external streaming devices instead.
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