A YouTube channel spent $70,000 testing LG TVs. They found device tracking and voice transcripts.

LG says its televisions don't record the conversations in your living room. Gamers Nexus spent about a month and roughly $70,000 investigating what the sets actually collect, working with Level1Techs and three security researchers. Their video, 216,000,000 Spy TVs, separates what a compromised television can do from what the tested sets do normally. The ordinary behavior is troubling enough.

Their set took inventory of the network. It found 38 other devices, including staff phones, printers, smartwatches, switches and thermostats. It collected display names, internal addresses and hardware identifiers, which the channel shows from about 17:08. It also logged nearby Wi-Fi network names and signal strengths, information that can help locate a television without GPS. Some device information appeared in packet captures of traffic leaving the set. Other traffic was encrypted, so the researchers couldn't read everything it sent to LG.

Forget the microphone for a second. A conference-room screen that identifies other devices on the network and regularly contacts a long list of domains deserves a place in the security review. One researcher's assessment was blunt: state-backed hackers "would be very comfortable inside LG TV."

Now the listening, which is where the reporting has to be careful. LG sets run automatic content recognition, which takes a fingerprint of what is on the screen and what comes out of the speakers, in pieces of about six seconds. Gamers Nexus estimates its television sent about 4 gigabytes of that recognition data alone to LG in a month, which is its own measurement of traffic it identified as ACR, not the set's total network use.

Separately, when somebody says the wake phrase, the microphone stays open for another 10 to 15 seconds after the talking stops, and whatever it picks up gets turned into text and written into a log stored on the set itself, which the channel reads out from about 46:17. The channel caught two of its own staff that way, talking about work behind the television, with no idea it was on. Steve Burke, who runs Gamers Nexus, called the captured data "an egregious invasion of privacy." The microphone heard someone speaking normally from 40 feet away. Finding those transcripts on the set is not the same as showing them being uploaded, and the channel doesn't claim it caught them leaving.

The clips everyone is passing around, the ones where the screen is dark and the network cable is out and the thing is still recording, came after the researchers took over the television. That matters. Burke says so himself in the video. "But that requires an adversary, which sounds scary," he says. "What we think is scarier is LG itself." They also found remote code execution flaws, which they're sitting on while LG patches them.

The microphone is there because of the ads

The viewing-data collection has a clear commercial purpose. The business is LG Ad Solutions, which is incorporated as Alphonso Inc. LG bought control of Alphonso in 2021. Its president told an industry panel, in a clip the channel plays twice, "we own the glass. We own the TV." Reading LG's financial documents, the channel puts Alphonso's first quarter revenue at 273.7 billion won and its profit at 32.6 billion won, about $204M and $24M by our arithmetic, and it cites Korean reporting that LG now wants the whole company.

Vizio's numbers explain the strategy better than any privacy policy does. In 2023 it made about $1.1 billion selling hardware, at a gross margin of minus 0.8%. Its platform and advertising arm made $598 million at 61%. Walmart bought the company the next year. For Vizio, the set was the loss leader and the advertising was the margin.

Which brings up the paperwork. LG's voice terms have US buyers confirm that they have already obtained consent from everyone else in the household whose information the set might collect, and they allow the voice data to be processed abroad, including in Korea, and kept for six months. Gamers Nexus counted close to 50,000 words across the agreements a buyer is handed. Then, on July 28, LG added language pushing customer disputes into binding arbitration instead of court. The channel's first video on LG had gone up on July 16.

Regulators got there first. Texas sued LG, Samsung, Sony, Hisense, and TCL in December 2025 over the same recognition technology, and LG settled on May 11. It agreed to stop collecting viewing data without informed consent, to show a pop-up explaining what gets taken, and to give people a simple way out. The Korean outlet Newsspace reported that a class action filed in California in April accuses LG sets of capturing screen content and audio. LG told the outlet the complaint is "a one-sided claim by the plaintiff" and that it "will respond appropriately."

LG's answer to the earlier round, given to TechRadar, was that "LG TVs do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations" and that voice recognition "is an optional user initiated feature that processes voice data only when activated by the user to fulfill a specific request." Gamers Nexus says LG never replied to the questions it sent this time.