You Bought a Screen, LG Installed a Microphone That Never Sleeps

if you own an lg tv then buckle your seatbelts because this one is a fscking doozy! your tv is likely listening to everything you say, even when the screen is off. this is not some tinfoil-hat forum post. it is a US$70,000 investigation with the receipts.

gamers nexus, a respected hardware-testing outfit, spent more than 500 hours tearing apart retail lg oled tvs, including the flagship g5. what they found is genuinely unsettling. the microphone kept capturing clear audio even while the screen was in standby, the state most people consider to be turned completely off.

the tv stored the audio locally even after they physically unplugged the ethernet cable, then uploaded it the moment it reconnected. and the mic cannot be turned off at the hardware level. you can disable a voice feature in settings. however, you cannot actually kill the microphone completely. that is, unless you want to muck around with the hardware, and physically "destroy" it. but who wants to do that?

the network behavior is a red flag all its own. the tv scans your home network and maps the devices on it, the phones, the watches, everything connected. then it goes even further, pushing the envelope. it is logging the names, signal strengths, and location data of the wifi networks around you, your neighbors included, building a picture of the entire network environment around the tv.

televisions do not need to know any of that to play cable tv, much less netflix or hbo max. that is not a feature for you. it is data collection about everyone near the glass, layered on top of an advertising business already built around harvesting viewing and device data.

there is another layer underneath all of this called automatic content recognition, or acr. it fingerprints what is playing on the screen and turns viewing behavior into data. and this is not lg's first trip to this particular principal's office. texas regulators already went after lg over collecting this information without informed consent, and lg settled earlier this year. their own ad division brags to advertisers that "we own the glass."

lg has sold something like 216 million of these televisions, and webos runs on more than 200 million sets worldwide. that is the size of the platform, not the number of confirmed spy devices. the findings come from specific models the researchers actually tested. big number, real concern, but it may be doing more work than it should.

here is the part that matters most, because it is where lg gets slippery. lg says on the record that its tvs "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations." the researchers say their testing shows the tv transcribing spoken audio into plaintext logs. read those two claims side by side. lg's statement is carefully worded around "ambient conversations," while the voice pipeline still appears to capture and transcribe more than an owner would ever expect.

that wording is not an outright denial. that is lawyer-speak, opting to hide behind words rather than being direct with the customer.

researchers also found unpatched remote-access bugs and residential-proxy code on these sets. what does that mean? a stranger's internet traffic may be quietly routed through your living room. the microphone is just the loudest part of a much bigger problem.

step back and look at what a television has become. you bought a screen. what arrived is an always-connected sensor watching what you play, mapping the phones and watches in your house, listening in standby, and cannot have its microphone fully switched off. it is sold to you at a premium and monetized on the back end through an ad business saying it owns the glass you are looking through.

the tv was the trojan horse. we let it in because it was convenient and it was pretty, and we never asked what it was doing when we thought it was off. it turns out the answer is plenty. the screen going dark was never the same as the device going quiet.