Researchers: LG OLED TVs scan your network and record mic audio in standby

Security researchers working with Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs say retail LG OLED sets, including the G5, behave less like appliances and more like surveillance nodes. Wireshark packet captures showed the TVs continuously probing the local network to inventory unrelated hardware such as phones and smartwatches, while also harvesting internal IP addresses, the names and signal strengths of nearby Wi-Fi networks, and location data. That feed flows into LG Ad Solutions, the company’s targeted-advertising business, which claims reach into 363 million ‘addressable’ secondary devices in the US alone by profiling everything sharing a user’s network.

Beyond the long-documented Automated Content Recognition that fingerprints on-screen audio and video to track viewing across inputs, bench testing surfaced something more alarming: the TV captured clean microphone audio while apparently powered down in standby. When researchers pulled the Ethernet cable, the set kept saving voice recordings locally and uploaded the cached files once connectivity returned — indicating the data collection is resilient by design, not dependent on an active connection.

The team also reported remote code execution flaws in webOS that are still under responsible disclosure. Given that the broad network listeners and data sweeps are enabled out of the box, their blunt recommendation is to keep LG televisions off the internet entirely and drive them with a separate streaming device. LG had not responded to the findings at the time of publication.