Gamers Nexus Exposed LG's Spying, and What They Found Is Alarming
A months-long technical investigation into LG smart TVs found always-on tracking, undisclosed network scanning, and security flaws serious enough to turn a television into a listening device.
What Happened
Gamers Nexus spent months tearing apart LG smart TVs, and what came out the other end is less a privacy complaint than a full technical indictment. The outlet's new investigation, done in partnership with Level1Techs and independent researchers known as Mr. Bruh and U-Turn, covers roughly 216 million LG televisions currently in homes, and the findings split into two uncomfortable categories: things LG built on purpose, and things LG never patched.
Tracking That Runs on Any Input
The built-on-purpose part centers on Automatic Content Recognition, the fingerprinting system LG uses to identify whatever is playing on screen so it can be fed into advertising and analytics. Researchers found ACR keeps running even when the TV is just acting as a dumb HDMI display for a laptop, game console, or cable box, meaning the set is profiling content it didn't even generate. There's no single settings toggle that fully turns it off, since it runs as a background webOS process independent of whatever input is active. During testing, the TVs also repeatedly scanned the local network and cataloged everything on it: phones, laptops, smartwatches, printers, 3D printers, network switches, even HVAC equipment, pulling device names, MAC addresses, signal strength, and internal IP addresses along the way. None of those devices had been connected to the TV. The televisions also picked up nearby Wi-Fi network names, signal strength, and channel data, essentially mapping the wireless environment around them.
Voice Logging and the Unplug Problem
Voice functionality raised a separate set of concerns. Gamers Nexus found that speech captured through voice commands gets converted to plain text and logged on the television, with the microphone staying active for 10 to 15 seconds after a person stops talking, long enough to catch whoever else happens to be in the room. In one test, voice data kept queuing on internal storage even after the TV was disconnected from the internet, then uploaded in full once the connection came back. That detail matters more than it might first appear: unplugging a smart device from the network is the standard advice for anyone worried about data collection, and here it doesn't work.
The Security Flaws LG Didn't Intend
Then there's the part LG didn't build on purpose. Researchers separately found remote code execution vulnerabilities in webOS that, if exploited, could turn a compromised set into a functioning listening device, including pulling audio from a connected USB webcam. Those exploit details are being withheld under responsible disclosure while LG gets a window to patch them, which is standard practice, though it also means the full severity isn't public yet. Bitdefender researchers had already flagged a related cluster of webOS vulnerabilities that let an attacker bypass a TV's authorization checks and add themselves as a user, then escalate to command injection, so this isn't the first time LG's software stack has had this particular problem.
LG's Own Words: "We Own the Glass"
The ownership question is where the investigation gets its bite. In footage from LG Ad Solutions' own B2B materials, company executives describe the arrangement in blunt terms: LG "owns the glass," not the person who paid for the television, and talks openly about identifying everyone in a household and tracking secondary devices beyond the TV itself. LG Ad Solutions operates through a subsidiary called Alphonso Inc., in which LG bought a controlling stake back in 2021 specifically to build out its connected-TV advertising business. That context reframes the network scanning and ACR data less as accidental overreach and more as inputs to a business LG has been actively expanding for half a decade.
When This Isn't Just a Living Room Problem
One detail that surfaced during the investigation's aftermath goes beyond consumer electronics. A surgeon who reviewed the findings reportedly asked what an LG display running ACR by default means for patient confidentiality in a clinical setting where the screen might be hooked up to a telemedicine call. If a hospital's display is fingerprinting HDMI audio while also carrying an unpatched remote-access vulnerability, that's not a hypothetical HIPAA problem, it's a live one, and it's not clear LG's consumer privacy settings were built with that scenario in mind at all.
This Isn't LG's First Time
None of this is entirely new territory for LG. The company was already investigated by the BBC back in 2013 over unencrypted viewing data being sent from TVs even after the relevant privacy setting had been switched off, and CVEs tied to LG's authorization and command injection flaws go back further than this year's report. What the new investigation adds is scale, mapping exactly what 216 million connected TVs can see about the rest of a household's devices, and a webOS exploit chain that turns passive data collection into active surveillance risk if it lands in the wrong hands.
What to Actually Do About It
For now, the practical advice from researchers is the same it's always been for any always-on smart device: keep firmware updated, dig into the privacy settings that ship off by default, and put the TV on its own isolated network segment so a compromised set can't see the rest of the house. It's a reasonable stopgap. It's also a strange place to land, that the fix for a television marketed as smart is largely about limiting what it's allowed to know.