If you know me, then surely you’d attest to how I’m always saying aloud how I wish more data could be collected by the digital devices in my vicinity in order to further personalize the attempts I encounter on every digital screen to extract more money from my bank account. It’s just that I crave efficiency in all things; why should I have to inform advertisers that a beloved pet has passed away before they start throwing ads for tiny tombstones at me? It would be far easier if even more devices in my vicinity could just listen in 24/7 instead, so they’d have a better chance of deciphering what I’m crying about and intuit what they could sell me to directly address it. And until now, I’ve always suffered the annoyance of assuming that if my smart TV happens to be turned off, it can’t simultaneously gather data about my e-commerce habits. Thankfully, it seems LG smart TVs may have delivered what I’ve been craving all along: A smart TV that goes out of its way to spy on the user even when it’s off. Finally, a way to surrender the last shreds of my privacy!
That allegation comes per a new investigation this week from a YouTube channel of all places, in conjunction with Level1Techs and a team of independent security researchers. In a more than two-hour video uploaded to the channel Gamers Nexus, the combined team lays out evidence demonstrating how various LG smart TV models store and utilize user data, even when the TV is currently off. Simultaneously, the investigation claims to have uncovered various security weaknesses that could allow hackers or bad actors to seize control of these already privacy-invading “features,” allowing for data collection on users by hackers in addition to TV manufacturers. Such security concerns have supposedly been turned over to LG to be addressed, but the South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate has plenty of other questions to answer here.
It’s finally happened: the improved quality of machine transcription and the greater ability to extract value from unlabelled data means “your tech is eavesdropping on you for marketing purposes” has crossed from “false conspiracy theory” to “true and concerning” www.theverge.com/tech/991190/…
— Alex Hern (@hern.bsky.social) 7:52 AM · Sep 8, 2026
Some of what the team found is already a fairly standard part of the shady business of serving personalized ads and recommendations on smart TVs, devices that many users tend to think of merely as 2000s-era televisions rather than the internet-equipped home computers (complete with apps) that they truly are. These various types of technology fall under the broader title of Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which is the title for a suite of technologies used to monitor what the user is watching or browsing, and generally how they’re using the TV. Pretty much all smart TV manufacturers use various forms of ACR to do everything from log your viewing habits to scan the other devices you connect to the TV via HDMI ports. Many TVs theoretically allow you to turn these settings off, but it requires navigating through menus that 99.9% of users will never touch.
The LG smart TVs assessed by Gamers Nexus, meanwhile, took some of these ACR technologies to distressing new levels. The techs here recorded evidence that the TVs were scanning and probing other wi-fi enabled devices on the same network in order to build a more thorough customer profile of the user for advertisers, in order to determine things such as what smartphones or watches a user possessed. But presumably even worse in the eyes of the average user was the constant use of the TV’s built-in microphones to capture audio from the environment, even when the screen was powered down. In fact, not even disconnecting the TV from a wi-fi source stopped it from gathering audio data–it merely kept collecting and stored the data locally, to be sent once the internet access was restored.
This in particular would seem to fly directly in the face of LG’s previous statement that its televisions “do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations,” and that voice-recognition features in general must be first activated by the user. LG does not seem to have issued any more recent press statement on the sprawling video investigation put out in the last 24 hours by Gamers Nexus and its collaborators.
Oh good the LG TV spyware video dropped. youtu.be/6IFVTcM28KA
— Chris Person (@papapishu.bsky.social) 11:19 AM · Sep 7, 2026
If this somehow led to litigation against the company, however, there’s pretty recent precedent in the matter. Just a few months ago, Samsung settled a lawsuit with the office of the Attorney General of Texas, based on how its own smart TVs had been using ACR for data collection, monetization and serving advertisements. As part of that deal, Samsung was forced to agree to stop collecting ACR data from customers in Texas without them giving explicit consent for personal data collection. It does make one wonder if some other state will take notice of this investigation into LG TVs and conclude that its own residents have been wronged.
In the meantime, if you want to confirm whether your own smart TV is collecting data in order to shape the ads and content recommendations you see, each major manufacturer has its very own set of hoops for you to jump through. This piece provides a good walkthrough on how to disable ACR settings, if you wish, on TVs from most of the major manufacturers.
At the end of the day, it comes down to how much the user has already been effectively conditioned to give up any expectation of privacy, to the point that some will no doubt specifically want to keep such features active, because they genuinely want advertising that is informed by everything from their other devices, to their private conversations. To the rest of us, this is a deeply frightening prospect. Or as Gamers Nexus offered by way of comparison: “If you want Flock cameras on your living room wall, this is how you get Flock cameras on your living room wall.”
