Summary
- Report says 216M LG TVs record users even when off and offline, harvesting voice and more.
- TVs reportedly ping networks, log IPs, connected devices, Wi‑Fi names, and locations for ads.
- Gamers Nexus demo captured recordings and Wireshark evidence.
The world of smart devices has always been a nightmare to navigate for the privacy-minded, but if one report is to be believed, it’s even worse than we may have imagined. A report on YouTube claims that 216 million LG TVs listen in on their consumers, even when the TV is turned off and it has no internet connection, and the data they harvest reportedly goes much deeper than what you said over the course of a day.
LG TVs are spying on their own users, says report
It claims that voice clips, IP addresses, and network devices are being phoned home
Over on YouTube, Gamers Nexus posted a video reporting on what they found with LG TVs. Right off the bat, they claim and demonstrate that the LG TV they had at the studio recorded people via the microphone, even when the TV was seemingly turned off. The TV also logged what he was saying while the network cable was unplugged, presumably so it could send the data back home once a connection had been re-established.
Soon after, Gamers Nexus showed reports that the LG TV was constantly pinging the home network and harvesting information on what’s connected to it, including PCs, watches, and phones. All of this data, alongside your IP address, location, names of Wi-Fi networks around you, and internal IP addresses, is reportedly being harvested by these TVs. Gamers Nexus even showed a video of the Wireshark results from their investigation, but they had to blur the entire screen because there wasn’t one single piece of data being harvested that they felt comfortable revealing to the internet.
Gamers Nexus loops this around to what LG is saying about its own advertising power:
“The TV crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn’t even know we were working on this, which might explain how LG ads can claim it knows about 363 million addressable secondary devices in the US, despite claiming a smaller 216 million smart TVs sold worldwide.”
It also brings up how executives have repeatedly claimed that they “own the glass” or “own the TV” in interviews, which further cements Gamers Nexus’ theory that the TVs are there to scrape data from consumers.
There is the usual disclaimer that comes with these claims, which is to always take it with a pinch of salt and to await further discoveries that support the claims made in the video. However, by the looks of the responses from users online, it appears the damage has already been done.
