LG hasn’t been making many friends lately. It annoyed some LG “smart” TV users recently when it tried to force them to use Microsoft’s Copilot AI system. It’s also been force-installing surveillance bloatware on many LG user’s monitors as it ramps up data surveillance and monetization.
Now LG is in hot water again, after YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and security researchers got together to demonstrate that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly “off”:
“The YouTube channel used Wireshark, a network protocol analyzer tool, and inspected the TV’s firmware and found that LG TVs “are capable of identifying your IP address, geographic location, name of every Wi-Fi network in the vicinity and signal strength, channel numbers of neighboring Wi-Fi networks in range, and other devices on the network, even if not connected to the TV in any way, and the internal IP address of other devices on the network, alongside others.”
Just so you remember how far the Overton window has shifted on this stuff, Google faced a massive scandal and subsequent lawsuit because its Google Maps street tracking vans were gathering snippets of public Wi-Fi SSID info while driving around back in 2010 or so. We’ve also been talking about LG’s unencrypted hyper consumer surveillance obsessions for more than a decade.
LG TVs were also found to be recording audio then storing the resulting data unencrypted. And the old refrain of “well don’t connect it to the internet” doesn’t guarantee your privacy will be protected and respected if your TV happens to connect later:
“We were even able to capture microphone audio while the TV was unplugged from the network. Burke said the audio was reportedly stored locally via plaintext, which could potentially allow the data to be sent to LG [if] the TV connects online again.”
LG, for its part, told the researchers and outlets like Ars Technica that this is all just normal stuff nobody needs to worry about:
“LG TVs can identify compatible devices on the same network to enable features such as device connectivity, content sharing or smart home functionality.”
The problem is you can’t really trust these companies to behave ethically when it comes to the collection, “anonymization,” and storage of sensitive data. Especially in a country being devoured by corruption and dead set on dismantling its privacy, consumer, and public safety regulators. Who do you think is going to investigate and hold companies like this accountable as surveillance ambition scales, the Trump FTC?
The more data collected and stored means a greater risk if LG is hacked, and given the company’s long history of unsound judgement, it’s only a matter of time before a lot of this information is leaked at scale.