I bought a television. I did not buy a surveillance node. But that is what LG shipped me, and they shipped it to 216 million other people too.
A 135-minute investigation by Gamers Nexus, working with Level1Techs and independent security researchers, found that LG smart TVs do things nobody asked for and nobody reasonably expects. The TVs scan your home network to map every device on it, including phones and smartwatches. They capture microphone audio while the screen appears to be off in standby mode. When disconnected from the internet, they keep recording locally and upload the buffered audio the moment you reconnect. They gather the names and signal strengths of neighboring Wi-Fi networks. They track your location.
The surveillance is the product. LG designed it this way.
The ad division tells on itself
LG Ad Solutions, incorporated as Alphonso Inc., is the entity that collects and sells all this data. Their own marketing materials are candid about the scale of the operation. They claim 216 million LG Smart TVs sold globally and 49 million in the US. Then comes the line that should make you stop: they say they have access to 363 million secondary addressable devices in the US alone.
Secondary addressable devices. That means your phone, your smartwatch, your laptop. Anything on the same Wi-Fi network as the TV. LG is watching what you own, what you connect, and where those devices are.
Their technology page reads like a surveillance catalog. They offer targeting by content viewership, device type, service provider, purchase habits, ad exposure, gaming habits, viewing habits, and location down to the zip code. All powered by Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, which fingerprints everything on your screen into a digital signature and logs it. Every show, every ad, every app, every input.
The terms of service are an admission
LG’s terms of use for connected products include a clause that should give every consumer in America pause. The contract requires the owner to “obtain all necessary consents from any third parties whose voices may be captured by the Product and to notify household members and guests that their voices may be captured and processed, in compliance with applicable wiretapping, eavesdropping, and privacy laws.”
Read that again. LG is telling you that it is your responsibility to inform everyone who enters your home that the television might be recording them. Your guests, your kids’ friends, your partner, anyone in range of the microphone. LG shifts the legal liability for wiretapping compliance onto you, while the TV is the one doing the recording.
If that clause is necessary, the product is the problem.
What the investigation actually found
The researchers tested retail LG OLED models including the LG G5. Using Wireshark packet captures, they watched the TV actively probe the local area network for other hardware. The TV gathered internal IP addresses, the names and signal strengths of nearby Wi-Fi networks, and location data. All of this feeds into LG Ad Solutions for targeted advertising.
Then they tested the microphone. With the screen off, in what appears to be standby mode, the TV captured clean audio. When they pulled the ethernet cable, the TV kept recording to local storage and uploaded the files as soon as the connection came back. The TV was designed to keep listening even when you think it is off.
The researchers also documented remote code execution vulnerabilities in webOS, LG’s TV operating system, that are currently moving through responsible disclosure. The TV scanning your network and capturing your audio also has exploitable security holes, a surveillance device with an open back door in 216 million homes.
”Just don’t connect it” is not an answer
The obvious response: don’t connect your TV to the internet. Use a streaming stick. And the researchers did recommend exactly that. But that advice puts the entire burden on the consumer, and it ignores the reality of how people actually use these devices.
216 million TVs are already in homes. Most of them are connected. The setup flow bundles ACR consent with basic functionality. The default is surveillance. Telling people to opt out of a system that is designed to make opting out difficult and that most people don’t understand is an admission that the default is unacceptable.
Alphonso’s own privacy policy says “Alphonso’s Video AI does not recognize human conversation, ambient sounds, and other non-commercial audio or video content.” The Gamers Nexus investigation found the TV capturing microphone audio in standby mode. Those two facts cannot both be true. Either the policy is lying or the TV is doing something the policy says it does not do.
The real product is you
This has happened before. In 2017, the FTC settled with Vizio for $2.2 million over ACR tracking without proper consent. Vizio was collecting data on what people watched, sharing it with advertisers, and burying the consent behind a setting called “Smart Interactivity” that gave consumers no idea what was happening. The FTC said that was unfair and deceptive.
LG is doing what Vizio did, and going further. Network scanning, standby audio, device mapping, 363 million secondary devices. If ACR without consent was worth $2.2 million in 2017, what is this worth? The scope is orders of magnitude larger, the data collection is more invasive, and the technology has had eight years to get worse.
LG sells televisions. But the business model is Alphonso Inc., the advertising company that lives inside the TV, harvesting everything it can reach and selling access to it. The TV is a loss leader for the surveillance business. You pay for the device. They profit from the data. And the data is who is in your home, what devices they carry, what networks are nearby, and what was said in the room while the screen was off.
Privacy is a right. LG treats it as a setting buried in a menu, defaulted to off so the surveillance can run by default. Call that what it is: a trap.
216 million devices. 363 million secondary devices. One ad company hoovering it all up. The television is the most expensive surveillance device most people will ever voluntarily put in their home, and LG made sure it was watching them back.
Disconnect it. Use a streaming stick. And then ask yourself why a television needs a microphone that stays on when the screen is off. It does not. You do. LG does.