Swansenreport

If you own an LG television, unplug it from the internet. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion of a September investigation from Gamers Nexus, working alongside security researchers and Level1Techs, who put LG’s OLED sets under a microscope using packet-capture tools like Wireshark. What they found goes well beyond the usual smart-TV grumbling about targeted ads.

LG’s televisions use Automatic Content Recognition to identify what’s on screen, then lean on microphones — including the ones built into remote controls — to record and transcribe conversations happening nearby, feeding snippets to LG Ad Solutions, an arm of the company that claims data from 216 million LG smart TVs worldwide, 49 million of them in the U.S. But the investigation uncovered something more troubling than ad targeting: plaintext transcripts of sensitive speech unrelated to any TV command, audio pulled from connected webcams, recordings captured while the TV appeared to be powered off, and even network scans probing for other devices in the home.

Perhaps most alarming, researchers found vulnerabilities in webOS, LG’s operating system, that let them remotely access and listen to captured audio — meaning the exposure isn’t hypothetical. In testing, phrases like a spoken Social Security number or credit card details turned up transcribed in plaintext.

Switching to an Apple TV box doesn’t help. The snooping happens at the television level, regardless of what’s plugged into the HDMI port.

The fix, for now, is blunt: physically disconnect the Ethernet cable and disable Wi-Fi in the TV’s settings, or block it at the router if you’re comfortable with firewall rules. Even then, the set will keep quietly logging data locally until it reconnects.

Sources: AppleInsider (Malcolm Owen, Sept. 7, 2026); underlying investigation via Gamers Nexus/Level1Techs on YouTube