LG Responds to Smart TV Spying Investigation

Researchers say LG smart TVs are scanning home networks, logging voice commands as plain text, and capturing microphone audio in standby.

The investigation into LG’s webOS platform came from Gamers Nexus, with researchers MrBruh, unturn, and Wendell Wilson. LG Ad Solutions claims 216 million smart TVs.

LG has since published a formal statement on the findings, and parts of it confirm the collection this investigation set out to document.

What the LG Smart TV Investigation Found

Using Wireshark, the team watched televisions sweep their local networks. One set identified 38 nearby devices, including staff phones, smartwatches, a 3D printer, and thermostats never connected to it.

The TVs also use Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, to identify what plays across inputs. One test unit sent around 4GB of ACR data to LG each month.

The sets could also collect IP addresses, geolocation data, and nearby WiFi network names, which Wilson noted can help pin down a device’s location. Most of this is built in, not a flaw.

A VPN masks your IP address, but it cannot stop a television from cataloguing the hardware sitting on your own network.

The Microphone Keeps Listening

Responding to the Texas lawsuit against five TV makers, LG said its TVs ‘do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations.’

These findings cover voice commands, not background conversation. Speech from those interactions could be turned into readable text and logged on the set.

The microphone stayed active 10 to 15 seconds after someone stopped talking, which researchers say could catch bystanders. Audio was captured in standby too.

In one test, voice data built up locally after the TV went offline, then uploaded on reconnect. They separately found webOS flaws that could turn a set into a listening device.

Here is the full investigation:

LG Responds to the Smart TV Privacy Findings

On September 12, LG published a statement titled Understanding Privacy on LG Smart TVs, saying recent coverage ‘may have contributed to misconceptions’ about how its televisions work.

The company says its televisions do not ‘record or transmit users’ conversations’ around the clock, and that speech becomes text only after a wake word or a press of the remote’s microphone button.

LG also states that ACR, voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional and off by default, and that a voice session caps out at roughly 18 seconds.

What I find more interesting is what LG confirms rather than what it denies.

The statement says nearby WiFi access point and signal strength data may be used to estimate the TV’s approximate location for ACR. It also says ACR viewing information may be shared with LG Ad Solutions, and in some markets in ways that ‘may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information.’

LG acknowledges that a TV with hands-free voice enabled keeps monitoring for the wake word in standby, and that nearby speech ‘may sometimes appear in speech-recognition results’ during an active session.

Data sales are the sort of practice that has landed other TV platforms in court over the past year.

Researchers Push Back on LG’s Statement

The investigators answered with a second video arguing the response reframes their findings instead of refuting them.

Their more serious criticism is that the statement does not address the security findings. It points to a bug bounty program and five years of updates for eligible sets, but says nothing about the webOS flaws they demonstrated.

Researcher unturn also shared new evidence from a TV running stock firmware with no exploits. On an HDMI input, the set fingerprinted incoming audio and sent it to an LG ad server alongside a device ID, timestamps, and location data that included the nearest major street.

It struck a nerve outside the tech crowd, where one Reddit thread noted that what once read as paranoia now arrives with packet captures.

Final Thoughts from Troy

A television that turns your voice into searchable text and keeps its microphone live in standby has stopped being just a television. The 38 devices catalogued in one sweep show how far past “what are you watching” this goes.

LG denies recording ambient conversations, and researchers stopped short of calling this deliberate spying. Read the statement closely though, and the company confirms the WiFi-based location estimates and the ACR data sharing on its own.

For more details, refer to the report from Cybernews and the official statement from LG.

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