It’s no exaggeration to say that if you own an LG smart TV, it might be spying on you.
The widely respected computer hardware experts at the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus found that the company’s boob tubes and pricey OLEDs can scan your Wi-Fi network to search for the devices you own, secretly record audio logs of your conversations using built-in microphones, and keep tabs on what you’re watching and listening to.
It collects all this data, Gamers Nexus found, even when the TV is disconnected from the internet and appears to be off in standby mode.
To unearth these surreptitious practices, Gamers Nexus partnered up with independent security researchers and Level1Techs. Their resulting two-hour video report has since been picked up by other trusted cybersecurity voices like Malwarebytes.
By digging into the firmware and intercepting some of the data the TVs were sending, the team found that the TVs were extensively scanning local Wi-Fi networks to log what devices were on it, including phones, computers, and other smart-home devices like thermostats. It even collected the names of nearby Wi-Fi networks, creating an alarmingly detailed picture of all the devices in a user’s household.
Why might that information be relevant to LG? The TVs also use a controversial technology called automated content recognition (ACR) that routinely scans and determines what you’re watching so it can sell that data to advertisers.
Combined together, they build an advanced and disturbingly comprehensive profile of what you watch and the devices you use, Gamers Nexus warn. All this data is sent back to LG Ad Solutions, its lucrative advertising business.
LG TVs, on top of it all, can also listen to you. Tests showed that their built-in microphones could capture clean audio of nearby conversations and generate transcripts of them, even when the TVs were in standby mode, which most TVs default to when you think you’ve turned them off, with the display powering down. The recording feature continued even when the TVs were unplugged from the internet, storing the audio files locally and uploading them the moment the internet connection was restored.
The researchers also found a vulnerability that allegedly allow a hacker to remotely execute code, though they’re keeping the details on this light so they can responsibly disclose their findings.
Many LG owners are furious about the news.
“LG hardware is just spyware,” fumed a post on the r/LGOLED subreddit. “You[r] TV is wiretapping your whole house.”
Smart TVs collecting data on you isn’t new — ACR in particular is well-documented — but the reported findings here illustrate a degree of invasiveness the public could only speculate about previously.
It’s far from the first time LG has caused a stir over purported privacy violations, either. Another Gamers Nexus investigation last month found that LG monitors were sneakily installing pop-up ads onto customers’ computers. The ensuing controversy caught Microsoft’s attention, with the company demanding LG remove the ads.
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