"Spy TVs: 200 Million Smart TVs Serve As Eavesdropping
And Listening Devices - Even When Switched Off"
by Leo Hohmann
"Remember when the government used to have to plant an electronic bug inside the home or office of a suspected criminal, and they needed to get a search warrant providing solid evidence of criminal wrongdoing before they could plant such a device? Those days are long over, as most of us purchase the bug ourselves and set it up in our living rooms. Most, if not all, smart TVs, along with smartphones, smart appliances, etc., are daily collecting loads of data on every individual and family in America.
Cybernews reports in a September 8, 2026 article that LG Corp.’s smart TVs can listen in on voice commands, gather data that reveals your location, and scan your home for other connected devices, according to a major new investigation into the company’s webOS platform. LG Electronics, maker of the smart TVs, is owned by the South Korean conglomerate LG Corp., which after Samsung is the world’s second-largest maker of internet-connected smart televisions.
Researchers working with independent technology outlet Gamers Nexus captured LG televisions scanning local networks and identifying phones, smartwatches, printers, air-conditioning units, and many other everyday consumer devices and appliances that had never been connected to the TV. These devices all have one thing in common, however. They are all connected to the internet and are part of the “internet of things.”
I’m pretty sure that if a similar test was run on other brands of smart TVs, the results would be similar, but this article focuses exclusively on LG as that was the company that was placed under a microscope by the independent researchers in their recent study.
Their investigation found that LG’s televisions use an advertising technology called Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, to identify what was being watched across different inputs, while voice interactions could be converted into plain text and stored in logs on the television. In other words, the TV’s speakers hear what you’re saying and the software is trained, probably using AI, to make a note of it and feed this information into algorithms. In one test, researchers said voice data continued to be stored even after the TV was disconnected from the internet.
Smart TVs are not only ubiquitous in homes, but in hotel rooms, hospitals and corporate offices, “potentially placing them alongside sensitive conversations and devices,” Cybernews reports. Gamers Nexus worked with cybersecurity researchers MrBruh and unturn, alongside Wendell Wilson of Level1Techs, to investigate LG TVs and the company’s webOS software. The results are presented in a video (below) posted to YouTube:
Full screen recommended.
Below is an excerpt from the Cybernews recap of the test run on LG smart TVs: In one test, an LG TV identified 38 other devices, including smartphones belonging to staff who were unaware of the investigation, smartwatches, a 3D printer, an air purifier, thermostats, and a dev board. According to Gamers Nexus, testing showed LG TVs were capable of collecting and identifying:
ͦ IP addresses and geolocation data.
ͦ Internal IP addresses belong to other devices on the network.
ͦ Names, signal strengths, and channels of neighboring WiFi networks.
ͦ Phones, smartwatches, and other connected hardware.
ͦ Content displayed on the TV using ACR.
ͦ Audio fingerprints of content played through the television.
ͦ Voice commands converted into plain text and stored in on-device logs.
ͦ Privacy and consent settings stored by the TV (and whether users had opted in or out).
Information about surrounding WiFi networks can potentially be used to help determine a device’s physical location, Wilson noted. Gamers Nexus said much of the network discovery and data collection it observed was built into LG’s TVs rather than the result of a security vulnerability. The investigation also reported that its test television was sending around 4GB of ACR-related data back to LG each month. I wonder how much of that data is sold to the govenment, or just handed over upon request? George Orwell’s "1984" is no longer a fictional account of a dystopian future. It’s here, and has been for quite a few years, but with AI we are rapidly moving beyond Orwell’s vision."
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