I can’t speak for every TV, but I was able to remove the Wi-Fi card from my TV. It might be something you can do with your TV too. In my case I just had to unscrew the back panel, find the card, and disconnect it. Thankfully it was a separate circuit board rather than part of a larger board.
How long until smart TV manufacturers partner with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to collect your data even when you don’t give them a connection?
I’m sure they are already on the market
It’s weird that this is the takeaway from that investigation that big media is pushing.
This is maliciously burying the headline that LG TVS ARE TRANSCRIBING EVERY WORD THEY HEAR IN YOUR HOUSE AND THEY’RE UPLOADING A TEXT LOG OF IT.
Depending on the TOS details, that may very well be a legit crime. Even in 1-party consent states this wouldn’t slide because LG isn’t a participant in the conversations it’s recording, and not everyone talking near a TV has agreed to the TOS.
And even with generous TOS, there’s gonna be legal issues. HIPAA, for instance, could really fuck them if the TVs are in a medical facility and are recording and transmitting private medical data without consent of the patients.
It is undeniably a crime. But in Glorious Free Republican America large corporations are exempt from the law.
I think the HIPAA stuff specifically could fuck them HARD. That can be more easily pursued civily. Criminal Courts don’t mean much to companies because they have to pay a minor fine and it goes away, because criminal courts don’t seek relief or compensation. Civil courts are where corporations can get gigafucked.
🍾🔥
Fucking hell we have two of these at home.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/09/07/disconnect-your-lg-television-from-the-internet-now
I wonder if the next generation will know if you’re watching the advertisements. They’ll probably call it something innocuous, like “auto pause.”
It’s literally just an algorithm applied to the WiFi antenna.
We’re fucked without comprehensive and effective privacy laws.
But they won’t do that. Someone will (dishonestly) argue that TV’s and monitors that can count how many viewers are watching and force everyone in the room to verify their identity when the ACR detects a curse word or breasts is “for the children.”Fuck buying an LG Tv lmao
Its all of them. The only tvs that aren’t doing this are dumb ones. The reason why they’re so cheap is that they are selling data. Its been this way for years.
all smart tvs do this! they’ve been doing it for a decade at this point! I’ve been saying never to connect your tv to your internet for the past decade because of this stupid shit that’s only coming out now.
never connect your tv to your internet or network. you want to watch netflix? don’t use your tv, use an appletv or nvidia shield device!
Are those devices not doing the exact same thing though? Why wouldn’t they? Sure they probably don’t have cameras and microphones in them but they probably still do ACR
Go to any mid sized or larger company and run a port scan and you’ll be immediately found and taken to the woodshed or fired.
But I guess doing it unannounced in peoples home is just fine.What about the larger companies with LG tvs in their offices?
They probably buy commercial/display TVs which don’t have that garbage.
You wouldn’t add them to the network. HDMI to the conf room table or a dedicated phone controller. Maybe an HDMI matrix.
Forget the TV calling home for advertisement info, i’m worried about holes in their screen mirroring and microphone that would let people snoop from the floors above/below me. If we need smart features, we tie them to either real media hardware, or plug them to a small computer.
Media bullshit at work gets its own isolation VLAN.
If they were serious enough to buy serious equipment, I wouldn’t have to do it. I’d still do it, but I wouldn’t have to.
They literally run speech to text, store it and exfiltrate it to their servers…
Even if you deny internet access, it can hop to other smart devices of the same brand using hidden SSIDs and exfiltratr data that way, or if the TV gets sold and connected to a network, all of the stored conversations will get sent to their servers. This was from the original GN investigation and associated security researchers
There isn’t really something one can network-admin a way out of it seems, sadly…
is there any actual evidence of
it can hop to other smart devices of the same brand using hidden SSIDs and exfiltratr data that way,
because that’s a touch paranoid sounding
Capability
Well this is something that every cheap WiFi chip can do in the last decade. Share WiFi through a hotspot. Hell, ESPHome does it by default just for ease of use and fallback debugging. Here is a very old project , dirt cheap chip that does it
Ease of Implementation
They already broadcast hidden SSIDs for direct connection for features like screen mirroring, etc… Researchers have exploited this exact thing for attack vector testing (though they weren’t testing the TV itself data ex filtration)
There is no way, with all of the privacy intrusions + their blatant disregard for network security (See GN video) and LG’s own advertiser marketing claims, that they don’t do that.
Other “sounds paranoid” things companies are doing
It isn’t like “they are tracking you in your own house from WiFi through your walls” (which now ALSO has been proven correct and is now an advertised “feature” for american ISPs) yet here we are. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260522023127.htm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiFi_Sensing, https://www.theverge.com/news/981381/comcast-xfinity-shield-wifi-motion-sensing
Automatic content recognition is also done by every manufacturer and also a “very paranoid” thing 5 years ago.
Not to mention literally this whole wiretap scandal that OP report is from.
From the original report itself, they also constantly scan all devices on the network, Bluetooth, and in the free bands their radios can pick up and log them so they know every device that has passed in their range, characteristics, and WiFi + Bluetooth geolocating is quite a standard practice for years for “increasing location accuracy”
LG themselves bought a company that links your real identification from retailers to a unique product number so LG will be able to actually be certain that a specific person is associated with the spied data instead of a guess based on accounts. (Also in GN investigation video 1)
Profitability
From their own financial reports as highlighted in the original investigation, LG’s profits from TV-based selling to advertisers and data brokers is literally more than their profits from selling the TVs themselves.
What else would stop them?
So we have established that it is dead simple, cheap, functionality already built into other features and profitable. The only other motive left would be ethics, but from the research by GN (reported on in the OP), they simply spy on you anyway, and when caught because that is illegal, they got a slap on the wrist (see US Texas lawsuit settlement), and changed their terms of service to say “you give your and everyone in your household’s express consent to comply to your local wiretapping laws” (using exactly the language “wiretapping”. So we can also establish that they have absolutely no ethics around data ex filtration, and no regard for legality and willingness to pay the small fines.
What would be the motive for them to look at this feature and say “nah, we aren’t going to do that extremely easy thing”? Laziness would be the only one that I could see, in which case, it will appear in future models at some point.
It is not as though they have to stream video through it, raw text data is incredibly small. A whole 300 page e-book can be around 1MB. It is uploaded in under 1 second and it is encrypted, so it blends in with other traffic.
It sounded paranoid to say that they record with the screen off but here we are.
Fire sticks will use Sidewalk. Roku will strike a deal with Comcast. It’s a matter of who gets caught first and how bad the backlash is. The rest will follow suit.
Keep in mind, they have to pay for those services, to identify traffic on your tv that’s presumably not registered to a meaningfull address.
FireTV could conceivably do it because they own the ecosystem, but even then, that’s a low-bandwidth network and doesn’t tie you to a physical address, just that the traffic is in your general neighborhood.
They don’t need an address, they have your Bluetooth MAC.
My point is, they’re all trying to create Networks that only they control, and you cannot stop
VLAN? Why would you let a monitor have a network connection? Grab the Mac address, and put it on a denylist so you don’t accidentally give it an IP address as part of your setup procedure.
smart boards, remote power off. I generally prefer (as I mentioned in other comments) to run them from PCs or an HDMI matrix, but I’ve had reasons to network-connect some here and there.
I’m interested in what they are doing with the information more than anything. It’s not unusual for a media device to be using SSDP/UPNP and mDNS, looking for media devices to connect to. Ideally, off by default with a way to enable/disable and not used for advertising.
LG owns an advertising company. Just like Google tracks everything you do on the internet via their analytics and search products and then feeds you targeted ads, LG tracks everything you watch, all the electronics in your house, and any conversations you have nearby, then feeds you ads through their TVs.
Just like google is an advertising company first and everything else second it’s probably a good idea to think of LG as an advertising company that happens to have a consumer electronics company bolted on. Their TVs are nothing but trojan horses these days, designed to spy on everything they can and get ads in front of your face.
Mostly targeting advertising. The original source is the GamerNexus video. They show in great details the kind of information they capture and give potential usage for it. For instance they can detect thermostats, air conditioning units and air purifier that may be on the network, products that LG also sells. They give another example: if they see you have an iPhone 13, they may send you ads for the new iPhone 17.
If you can detect and identify the other devices on the LAN, you know exactly which other smart devices the customer has, and at scale that’s very valuable market research. They could probably even start sending ads to customers for an LG replacement if a device drops off the network.
Scanning for phones sounds a bit like the old-school Nielsen viewing statistics collection - who’s in the room, what are they watching?
God damn LG is really flaming all the way down to the ground aren’t they. Greed will make you do crazy shit.
My dad’s HP laptop started tripping a Honeypot on my network, now I gotta worry about LG as well…
I need to learn how to do this
Someone at LG needs an ass whooping
No. They need life in prison. Hundreds of them.
Por que no los dos?
I wonder if I could desolder the WiFi chip
On that note, does anybody know a good set top box with DolbyVision support that doesn’t require Amazon or Google services?
Because the only one that comes to my mind would be an AppleTV and I don’t want to believe that’s the least terrible option…Roll your own with a mini-PC?
Hate to break it to you, but AppleTV really is the best option.
I haven’t tried it, but I would think that running something shitty like a Roku but gating it with a pi-hole would be reasonable. You just have to make sure that there’s no open networks within reach (neighbors, etc).
AppleTV really is the best option.
Best for who? There are all kinds of options starting from a physical DVD player…
Best for who?
For people who want a streaming box.
I thought it was best for people who want to pay for subscriptions - and of course the people who take their money.
the older my Shield gets, the more I end up looking at the apple TV as the least worst of the bunch. until some foss Linux approach gets easy enough for me to be satisfied it won’t drive the rest of the household mad, that is
Yup. I went Apple TV for our main TV. Apple TV is easy for rest of the household and isn’t a huge Trojan horse. Retired the shield to the upstairs bedroom.
it’s a trojan horse for Apple though right? Apple still collects tons of telemetry they’ve just never been caught selling it
True. But also, a Linux box at the TV just isn’t practical when you live with normal non technical people. Pick your poison unfortunately. I will say it is behind a pi-hole.
I’ve been pretty shocked at the “non technical people” who just walk up to our Linux box TV setup, fire up Kodi, navigate the menus and start movies. 10 years ago that NEVER happened, today it’s not unusual. Even 15 years ago it was also common that all kinds of TV setups, including “normal” consumer gear, needed a one page “user’s guide” that a lot of people still couldn’t manage to make work.
Fair enough. I also recommend Apple when Linux isn’t an option
Honestly, I’m surprised this isn’t common behaviour with all Smart TVs these days. It is trivial to probe a LAN network.
It is common behavior for a lot of consumer IoT devices. If it goes on your network and you don’t control the software, you should consider it compromised. Even if the manufacturer isn’t doing outright malicious stuff, it likely isn’t secured very well (they never are) so there’s every chance that someone else could find it and use it as a platform for malicious activity.
Only if you give it access
They used to have good TVs :( It’s a good thing I stay away from Smart TVs in general.
I found it to be a struggle to find a non-smart TV that was decent…
Aren’t all TVs non-smart if you do not connect it to the internet?
No they will still collect data that they can
But if they don’t ever get access to the internet, they can collect all the data they want? Unless they connect to nearby unsecured wifi and use that to connect to their server.
There were unsubstantiated rumours that:
- Samsung was connecting to open wifi
- Amazon’s wifi sharing was for this
- 5G was for this and these companies would add SIMs to the TVs.
None of those have been observed or proven though.
In the cases of the LG tvs, they will connect themselves to any open wifi in range, including the Xfinity/AT&T public wifi spots that are often enabled on people’s rented routers.
So if your neighbor, or the Starbuck’s on the corner has open wifi then that’s enough for your TV to send all your data to the mothership.
And just to reiterate, “all your data” includes transcripts of everything you’ve said in vicinity of said TV.
Exactly, I’m very disappointed. I bought and LG OLED in 2019, loved it for the image quality and smooth UI. It’s time for an upgrade soon, and I was thinking LG, but will probably have to go diff direction.
But go where though? Every single manufacturer is competing to see who can do the most anti-consumer bullshit and get away with it. They’ve been slowly boiling the frog for two decades now.
I’m holding onto the last of the good plasma tvs from Panasonic, Circa 2012. it’s a fantastic picture and no crap. Rs232 serial control for home assistant to turn it on and off.
I’m dreading the day it dies and I have to find the least shitty replacement
I’ve got the same one. It is awesome. I will pay for someone to repair it if it breaks. 720p of course but all my stuff is DVD so who cares.
