The TVs LG told reporters the investigation is “not true.” Gamers Nexus answered the same day. Watch
LGSpyware A consumer alert by Critical Error Computing
The living room

The monitor was the small one.

None of this is our work. Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs and two researchers — MrBruh and uturn — put 135 minutes of packet captures and bench tests on retail LG televisions. We're reporting it as theirs.

By Critical Error Computing · Updated

What they found

  • It maps the house. Devices that were never paired with the set — phones, watches, routers, thermostats, air purifiers, server management controllers, PCs.
  • It maps the street. Names, signal strengths and channels of neighbouring Wi-Fi networks, plus the household's public and internal addresses.
  • It listens with the screen off. Plaintext transcripts generated from captured audio. This is the finding LG denies most directly, and the one nobody outside the original team has tested.
  • Pulling the plug only delays it. Off the internet, a set kept capturing and stored it locally, then sent once it reconnected.
  • It watches every input. Content recognition samples audio and video across inputs, including whatever is on HDMI — about 4GB a month from one test set.
  • It knows your street. On HDMI alone, with nothing broadcast, one set sent 20 packets a minute to LG's ad arm carrying audio fingerprints, a device ID, timestamps and a location fixed to the nearest major road.

Sources: The Register (Sep 8) · Malwarebytes (Sep 7) · PPC Land (Sep 12) · the investigation itself

The answer to LG's denial, published the same week. All four videos →

What LG says

“The claims made in the recently published video are not true.”

LG's televisions “do not continuously record or transmit user's conversations,” and speech-to-text “begins only if a user activates a voice interaction through a supported wake-word feature or by pressing the voice button on the remote control.”

LG, to Tom's Hardware and Engadget, September 9–12

Three things are worth separating out of that.

Denied

That the sets record ambient conversation.

But

The researchers describe transcripts produced with the screen off, which is a narrower claim than ambient recording. A second lab settles this, not a statement — and nobody has run one.

Confirmed

That the televisions scan the local network, which LG calls standard smart TV behaviour.

But

Nobody disputed that it happens. The question is why a television needs an inventory of your thermostat and your neighbour's Wi-Fi.

Unanswered

Content recognition runs on consent, LG says, and unrecognised audio is processed locally and deleted.

But

Consent is what Texas made LG rewrite in May. The finding here is volume — roughly 4GB a month, and a location payload leaving over HDMI.

Security researchers quoted by TechRadar made the same point: the denial answers the voice question and leaves the rest alone.

The part that isn't about advertising

The researchers also reported remote code execution in webOS: the television's own browser renders a malicious page, which then forges a “a mobile device would like to pair with your TV” prompt. A compromised set sits inside the home network with a microphone attached.

Still open as of September 12

Details are being withheld while responsible disclosure runs. No CVE has been published, no firmware fix has shipped, and LG hasn't addressed the vulnerabilities publicly. Waiting is the correct behaviour from everyone here, ourselves included. It's listed so it doesn't get lost behind the advertising story.

This keeps happening

In 2013 an LG television was caught sending the filenames on a user's USB drive back to LG, and kept transmitting after the owner opted out. LG admitted it.

In December 2025 Texas sued five TV makers over content recognition. LG's US unit settled on May 11, 2026 with no admission of liability, agreeing to get consent before collecting viewing data, show a real disclosure and offer a working opt-out. Four months later came the captures above.

In July 2026, Spur found residential-proxy code in more than 42% of the apps on LG's own webOS store, quietly renting out the bandwidth of people's televisions. Krebs on Security reported it; LG said non-compliant apps would be suspended.

What to switch off

None of this stops the network scanning, and none of it touches the unpatched bug. It does cut what leaves the set.

  1. Content recognition. Settings → All Settings → General → System → Additional Settings → turn off Live Plus.
  2. Ad tracking. Same menu → Advertisement → Limit Ad Tracking, and reset the advertising ID while you're in there.
  3. Voice. Turn off far-field voice recognition if you don't use it. By LG's own account that's the feature that opens the microphone without the remote.
  4. The blunt one. Take the television off Wi-Fi and feed it from a streaming stick. The set keeps capturing; it loses the route home.

Menu names move between webOS versions and regions. Look for Live Plus, Additional Settings and Advertisement.

Critical Error Computing Custom gaming PCs, built by humans · Humble, TX

We have not tested a television. Everything on this page is other people's work, labelled as theirs — our own bench work is the monitor. More about CEC ↗