A months-long teardown of LG smart TVs has turned up plain-text logs of captured audio and network activity that researchers say kept running even when the screen looked switched off. LG disputes the central claims. Here's what's confirmed, what's disputed, and what remains unresolved.
The Briefing
- A joint investigation by the YouTube channels Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs, working with outside researchers, reports that LG televisions produced readable logs of captured audio and kept gathering information while their screens looked powered down.
- The same team says the sets mapped nearly every other gadget sharing a household's network, from smartphones and smartwatches to routers, thermostats and even office server hardware, far beyond what streaming a show requires.
- LG told several outlets on September 9 that the core allegations "are not true," saying its televisions only process voice data when a remote button is held down or an opted-in wake phrase is detected.
- The clash follows a May 2026 Texas settlement in which LG agreed to build consent screens for a related but distinct viewing-data practice, part of a case that also swept up Samsung, Sony, Hisense and TCL.
What the Testers Say They Found
Two hardware-focused YouTube channels, Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs, spent months picking apart retail LG OLED sets, including the newer G5 line, working alongside outside researchers who go by the handles MrBruh and uturn, according to Tom's Hardware. Their findings were packaged into a video running roughly 135 minutes, built on Wireshark packet captures and firmware teardown work.
Gamers Nexus founder Stephen Burke said his crew pulled IP addresses, rough geographic coordinates, and details about nearby Wi-Fi signals — network names, strength readings, channel numbers — straight out of the televisions' traffic. He added that the sets kept a running list of unrelated hardware on the same connection, including smartwatches, air purifiers, home routers, connected thermostats, and even server management controllers that had never been paired with the TV. Describing the sheer volume of what his team pulled from a single unit, Burke called it "an egregious invasion of privacy."
Standby Mode and the Microphone Question
The sharpest claim in the video concerns what happens once the screen goes dark. According to the investigators, the sets continued monitoring for a wake phrase and produced plain-text transcripts of what the microphone picked up, including — they allege — while the unit sat disconnected from the internet, holding that data locally until a connection came back, per Malwarebytes. Burke's team says it is coordinating a separate, responsible disclosure process with security researchers over an alleged flaw that could let an attacker run code remotely on the hardware, according to Digital Watch Observatory.
LG Pushes Back, Point by Point
LG disputed the heart of the investigation in statements issued to multiple outlets on September 9. A company spokesperson said "the claims made in the recently published video are not true," arguing that its sets capture ambient sound only in two circumstances: a user physically holding down the remote's voice button, or, after someone has manually switched on the Far-Field listening feature, the TV recognizing the phrase "Hi LG." Wake-word recognition happens entirely on the television itself, the company said, and any audio that doesn't match the phrase gets discarded on the spot rather than leaving the device.
On the network-mapping claims, LG didn't dispute that its TVs scan for nearby hardware — it called that a routine, expected behavior for any modern connected device, not evidence of covert surveillance, per TechRadar. The company also confirmed its automatic content recognition system, which studies what's on screen to power ad targeting, only feeds that business after a customer opts in, and that declining keeps the data out of advertising use altogether.
Not a First Offense — for Either Side
This isn't LG's only recent brush with privacy scrutiny. Roughly seven weeks earlier, the same Gamers Nexus team reported that plugging certain LG monitors into a Windows 11 machine could quietly trigger installation of an LG-branded app that served pop-up ads, mostly promoting McAfee software — a behavior Microsoft later moved to shut down.
Nor is this the company's first regulatory headache over television data. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five manufacturers — LG, Samsung, Sony, Hisense and TCL — in December 2025 over undisclosed use of automatic content recognition to track what people watch. Samsung reached a settlement that February; LG followed in May, agreeing to add opt-out screens and to bar sending viewing data to entities linked to the Chinese government, per Secure Privacy. Paxton said the deal helps ensure that "consumers maintain their fundamental right to privacy in their own homes." Sony, Hisense and TCL remain in active litigation.
Where Things Stand Now
Whether the new findings trigger fresh regulatory scrutiny is an open question. For now, what a darkened LG television actually does behind the scenes comes down to two conflicting technical narratives — one from a team of independent testers, another from the manufacturer — and no outside, third-party audit has yet confirmed either account in full.
