LG Smart TVs Caught Recording Audio and Scanning Home Networks While Off

A 500-hour, $70,000 investigation by Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs found LG smart TVs logging microphone audio in plain text during standby mode and mapping every device on a home's Wi-Fi network, then feeding that data to LG's ad arm. Is your LG TV listening to you? According to findings Gamers Nexus published with Level1Techs on September 7, 2026, the honest answer is yes, even when the screen is dark and the set looks off. The team spent more than 500 hours and roughly $70,000 testing LG sets, including the G5 OLED, and watched them keep recording. Audio and text files piled up in local storage while the TV sat disconnected from the internet. Reconnect it, and the files upload. That alone would be a story. But the investigators, working with three independent security researchers, went further. They muted a TV's primary microphone through the settings menu and then pulled a clean recording off a second, hidden microphone that the mute switch never touches. Wireshark packet captures showed the televisions actively scanning the home network using UPnP, a protocol meant to let devices find each other automatically. In practice, that meant the TV was fingerprinting phones, smartwatches, printers, laptops and other smart-home gear that had nothing to do with LG at all. Where does that data go? Some of it lands with LG Ad Solutions, the company's targeted-advertising division, which tells advertisers it can reach 363 million "secondary addressable devices" in the US, according to the investigation. That figure is worth sitting with. LG has sold roughly 216 million smart TVs worldwide. A number that large only makes sense if LG is counting every phone, tablet, watch and other gadget that happens to share a network with one of its televisions, not just the TVs themselves. Separately, the researchers found remote code execution vulnerabilities in webOS, the software running LG's TVs, that could let an attacker turn a set into a covert listening device without the owner touching it. No physical access required. In one proof of concept, the team compromised an LG G5 and had it record room audio with the screen off and the Ethernet cable physically unplugged, then exfiltrate the file the moment connectivity returned. The team is withholding technical details, including CVE numbers, while responsible disclosure with LG continues. That restraint is doing the company a favor. It also means the exposure is real right now, not theoretical. LG TVs aren't confined to living rooms. Roughly 216 million of them are running in homes, hospitals, offices and hotels. A hospital break room or a hotel suite with a compromised set is a very different privacy problem than someone's TV in their den. The timing is the part that makes LG look worst. In comments published by TechRadar on July 22, 2026 and by 01net the following day, LG said its televisions "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations" and described voice recognition as optional and user-initiated. Two months later, an independent investigation - stacked with packet captures and recovered audio files - said otherwise. LG had no comment. Silence reads differently after a specific, on-the-record denial gets contradicted by evidence. The Register called it an "egregious invasion of privacy" in its coverage of the findings. That's not overstatement. A TV that logs what's said in a room, stores it as plain text, and keeps working around a hardware mute switch isn't a data-collection edge case. It's a design choice, and LG made it. Why this matters beyond one company Frankly, this should worry anyone building hardware that touches a home network, not just LG customers. If a TV maker can quietly build a device graph of every gadget on your Wi-Fi and route it to an ad business, the same playbook is available to any connected-device company with a microphone and a Wi-Fi radio, backed by a revenue team asking for more addressable reach. Startups selling smart speakers, doorbells, thermostats or anything with "AI-powered" in the pitch deck should read this as a preview of the liability question regulators and plaintiffs' lawyers will start asking about their own products. Consent is the crux. Consent buried in a setup wizard is not the same as consent a reasonable person would recognize, and a hidden second microphone is not a bug you can blame on an intern. For now, the fix that actually works is blunt: unplug the TV's Ethernet, disable Wi-Fi in the settings menu, or don't connect it to the internet at all. LG's own privacy promises, as of September 8, 2026, are not one you can verify by reading the box. Also read: Apple's First Foldable iPhone Could Cost More Than $2,000 • Ethereum Sets a December 2029 Deadline to Beat Quantum Computers • Qualcomm Strikes AI Chip Deal With Amazon and Hands Over a $4 Billion Stake