An investigation into LG’s smart television lineup found that the sets keep gathering information about the people and devices around them long after the screen goes dark. Testing carried out by the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, working alongside Level1Techs and independent security researchers, showed LG OLED televisions cataloguing nearby phones, smartwatches and other hardware connected to a home’s Wi-Fi network, in some cases without the owners of that hardware knowing a television was involved at all. The findings, published in early September 2026, describe data collection that goes well beyond simply tracking what appears on screen.
Packet Captures Show the Television Mapping Every Device on the Network
The team ran packet captures and firmware analysis on retail LG OLED sets, including the flagship G5 model running webOS. Gamers Nexus investigator Steve Burke said the television “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,” according to a report detailing the investigation. Beyond identifying individual devices, the testing found the sets logging the names and signal strength of neighboring Wi-Fi networks, a pattern researchers linked to location profiling, since a snapshot of nearby network names can help estimate roughly where a device is physically located. Gamers Nexus summarized the scale of the behavior across LG’s installed base by describing the sets as roughly 216 million televisions capable of reporting on millions of other devices in American homes.
Microphone Recordings Reportedly Continued After the Ethernet Cable Was Pulled
Bench tests found the built-in microphones on the tested sets capable of recording audio while in standby, with the screen dark, under the conditions researchers set up. Disconnecting a television from the internet did not fully stop the behavior: according to Malwarebytes’ write-up of the findings, the set stored the resulting audio locally and uploaded it once a network connection returned. The same coverage noted that audio capture could extend to compatible soundbars and external microphones paired within the LG ecosystem, widening how much of a room’s sound could be picked up beyond the television’s own hardware.
Automatic Content Recognition Feeds LG’s Advertising Arm
Automatic Content Recognition, the fingerprinting technology that samples on-screen audio and video and compares it against a reference database to identify what’s playing, was also part of the findings. The investigation found LG’s version of the system extends across every input the television has, including HDMI, so a show watched through an external device such as a streaming box or game console is logged the same way as content played through a built-in app. That data reportedly feeds LG Ad Solutions, the company’s advertising division, which has marketed its own reach to advertisers as extending to 363 million “secondary addressable devices” in the United States. Automatic Content Recognition has drawn regulatory scrutiny before: Malwarebytes noted that Samsung settled a lawsuit with the Texas Attorney General over how its televisions used the same kind of viewing-fingerprint technology to collect and monetize data, a case that suggests LG’s practices sit within a wider industry pattern rather than an isolated one.
LG Executives Described “Owning the Glass” in Pitches to Advertisers
Clips included in the Gamers Nexus video show LG executives describing the company’s television footprint to potential ad buyers using phrases including “we own the glass” and “we own the TV.” TechRadar’s coverage quotes company marketing language aimed at businesses stating that “within an LG household, we can help extend [an advertising] campaign footprint to the other devices in the household.” That pitch lines up closely with the network-scanning behavior researchers documented, since spotting a phone or smartwatch on the same Wi-Fi network is one way to connect a television viewer to the other devices in their home.
Researchers Also Flagged Unpatched Software Vulnerabilities
Beyond the data-collection features built into the sets, Malwarebytes reported that LG’s webOS software carries documented remote-code-execution vulnerabilities from past disclosures, including CVE-2024-1885 in LG Signage webOS and CVE-2018-17173 in LG’s SuperSign EZ content-management software. The Gamers Nexus team separately reported additional flaws directly to LG and has withheld technical details while a responsible-disclosure process is still underway, so the full scope of what could be exploited remains only partly public. Security researchers said a compromised television could give an attacker a foothold inside a home network that extends well past the TV itself, including the ability to activate its microphone remotely, pull stored recordings or use the set as a launch point to probe other devices on the same network.
LG Has Not Issued a Public Response
As of publication, LG had not issued a public response addressing the investigation’s specific findings. It is not the company’s only privacy controversy this year: in July 2026, LG monitors were found to be silently installing an adware-like application on Windows PCs that displayed pop-up ads for other LG software and for McAfee antivirus. Malwarebytes’ guidance for owners concerned about the TV findings is that adjusting settings alone may not be enough, since turning off Automatic Content Recognition, voice features or personalized ads in a set’s privacy menu does not necessarily stop the deeper collection researchers described. The more reliable option researchers pointed to is disconnecting a television from the internet entirely and routing video through an external streaming device over HDMI, combined with placing smart TVs and similar connected hardware on a separate guest network so that a compromised device has less of the home network to reach.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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