LG TVs caught listening with the screen off
A 135-minute investigation published by Gamers Nexus on 7 September 2026, made with Level1Techs and independent security researchers, says a retail LG smart TV captured clean microphone audio while its screen was in standby, kept the recordings locally and sent them out the moment the set was back online. The same tests show the television scanning the home network around it and collecting the names and signal strengths of neighbouring Wi-Fi networks.
In short
- Researchers demonstrated microphone audio captured on an LG OLED with the screen in standby, uploaded after reconnection.
- Packet captures show the set scanning the LAN for phones and watches, plus nearby Wi-Fi names and signal strength.
- LG said in July that its TVs "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations" and has not commented on this investigation.
What the LG smart TV investigation found
The work was done on retail hardware, including an OLED G5, not on a lab prototype. Two findings sit at the centre of it. The first is the microphone: the researchers report audio captured while the screen was, or at least appeared to be, powered down in standby, stored on the device and uploaded when the network came back. The second is the network behaviour: Wireshark captures show the television sweeping the local network for hardware that has nothing to do with it, phones and smartwatches among them, and logging internal addresses along with the names and signal strengths of Wi-Fi networks nearby.
Neither of those is the part of a smart TV people usually argue about. The familiar one is automatic content recognition, which on LG sets is branded Live Plus: it samples what is on the screen, turns it into fingerprints and logs what you watch. That data has a destination. LG Ad Solutions, the company's advertising arm, markets access to 363 million secondary addressable devices in the United States alone, and it reaches them precisely by knowing what else lives on the same network as the television.
What LG says
The company has denied the general accusation before. In statements published in July 2026 LG said its televisions "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations" and described voice recognition as optional and started by the user. That denial sits awkwardly next to the company's own updated user agreements, which describe AI voice features that record people near the set, and next to the on-screen notice LG added telling owners to warn guests that they may be recorded. As of publication LG has not answered the September findings specifically.
What you can switch off tonight
The settings below are the ones that govern watching data, voice and advertising on webOS. Menu paths move between firmware versions, so if a name is missing, look for it one level up or down rather than assuming your set does not have it.
- Turn off content recognition: All Settings, General, System, Additional Settings, then Live Plus off. On older firmware it hides under Quick Start+.
- Withdraw the agreements: All Settings, Support, Privacy and Terms, User Agreements, then uncheck Viewing Information and Interest-Based Advertisement.
- Turn off the microphone side: All Settings, General, AI Service, then uncheck Voice Recognition and Voice Information if you do not use voice control.
- Check the second agreements screen: All Settings, General, About This TV, User Agreements, and opt out of everything you do not need.
- If the remote has a microphone, remember it is a separate device with its own switch and its own batteries.
Turning those off removes consent and the features built on it. It does not, on its own, prove that a set has stopped talking to the internet, which is why the more thorough answer is at the network level.
Why a VPN does not fix this one
This is worth stating plainly, because the reflex is to reach for a tunnel. A VPN on the router encrypts traffic between your home and the VPN provider, and it hides your address from the sites you visit. The television is inside that tunnel with you. It still sees the phones and watches on your LAN, still hears the room, and its data still leaves your home, just through a different exit. Nothing about a tunnel stops a device you invited into the network from cataloguing the network.
What does change the picture is isolation. A separate guest network or VLAN for the TV keeps it from enumerating your phones and laptops. A firewall rule that blocks the set from the internet, or simply not giving it Wi-Fi credentials and feeding it from a streaming stick you trust more, cuts the upload path. DNS-level blocking of the vendor's telemetry domains helps as well, though a device that stores data locally until it gets a connection will simply wait. The uncomfortable part of these findings is that the fix is architectural: treat the television as an untrusted device on your network, because that is what the packet captures describe.
