What A 500-Hour Investigation Found
Gamers Nexus, working with Level1Techs and three independent security researchers, spent more than 500 hours and roughly 70,000 dollars capturing network traffic and analyzing firmware from LG smart TVs, publishing the results on September 7, 2026.
Using packet capture tools, the team documented microphones that kept recording for 10 to 15 seconds after a person stopped speaking, picked up test phrases including a mock credit card number, and converted some of that speech into plain-text logs stored on the television itself. The recording didn't require the TV to be actively in use: researchers captured audio with a dark screen and while the set was disconnected from the internet, then watched the stored audio upload automatically the moment the connection returned.
The televisions also scanned the entire home network using the UPnP protocol, cataloguing every phone, PC, printer, and smart-home device attached to it, along with nearby Wi-Fi network names and signal strength.
The Company's Denial Doesn't Match The Recording
LG told reporters that its television sets "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations." That statement sits directly against the investigation's own packet captures and stored audio logs, which the researchers say they can reproduce.
The company did acknowledge a separate, related problem: security researchers found that roughly 42 percent of apps on LG's webOS app store contained residential-proxy code, letting outside parties route their own internet traffic through a customer's television and internet connection without that customer's knowledge. LG said it is working with app developers to remove that code.
Neither response addresses the automatic content recognition system, branded Live Plus, which keeps fingerprinting whatever is on screen for advertising purposes even when a viewer switches the TV to work as a plain HDMI monitor for a game console or laptop.
What To Actually Do About It
This isn't a niche problem. LG Ad Solutions itself claims data from roughly 216 million LG smart TVs worldwide, including about 49 million in the United States, and turning the tracking off isn't a single settings toggle.
| Step | What it stops | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Disable ACR and voice recognition | On-screen content fingerprinting and ambient audio logging | Settings menu, usually under a privacy or "Live Plus" submenu |
| Turn off personalized ads | Ad-targeting data sent to LG Ad Solutions | Settings menu, general or privacy section |
| Move the TV to a guest or IoT Wi-Fi network | Network scanning of your phones, PCs, and other devices | Router settings, not the TV itself |
| Disable UPnP on your router | The TV's ability to auto-discover every device on the network | Router settings |
| Update TV firmware from a USB drive, not over the network | Exposure to the unpatched remote-code-execution bugs reported to LG | LG's support site, downloaded to a separate computer first |
None of these steps requires buying a new television, and none of them depends on LG shipping a fix first. For a household or a small office where an LG set sits in a meeting room or a living room with a work laptop nearby, running through that list once is a better use of ten minutes than waiting for the company to settle the disagreement about what its own hardware does.
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