ou buy a premium television for pristine black levels and flawless HDR, not to invite an active surveillance beacon into your living room. An exhaustive investigation by Gamers Nexus, conducted alongside Level1Techs and independent security researchers, proves that retail LG smart TVs routinely sweep local networks, profile secondary hardware, and capture clean microphone audio even when the display sits in standby mode. The audit focused directly on retail LG OLED units, including the flagship G5.
Running deep packet captures via Wireshark, the research team discovered the sets methodically interrogating the local area network for unrelated hardware, logging internal IP addresses assigned to smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches. Beyond sniffing local subnets, the tested LG panels actively recorded the SSIDs and signal strengths of neighboring Wi-Fi networks alongside coarse location data.
The sets actively scan the local area network for unrelated hardware, including phones and smartwatches.
This continuous reconnaissance operates in lockstep with Automated Content Recognition (ACR), which samples on-screen audio and video into digital fingerprints to catalog everything you watch across inputs, regardless of source.
The advertising machine behind the glass
All of this accumulated telemetry feeds straight into LG Ad Solutions, the hardware maker's aggressive advertising wing. While LG claims roughly 216 million smart TV sales globally, its ad division boasts access to over 363 million secondary addressable devices in the US alone simply by fingerprinting companion hardware sharing the same Wi-Fi router. In practice, the television operates as a trojan scout profiling every personal device in the house.
Physical bench tests exposed even more invasive telemetry. The researchers demonstrated that the LG TV can record clean microphone audio while the panel appears completely shut off in standby. When testers severed the Ethernet connection mid-capture, the TV cached the voice recordings locally and dispatched the backlog the second network connectivity returned.
Pulling the plug on webOS
The investigation also uncovered critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in webOS, which are currently moving through responsible disclosure channels. Because webOS ships with overly broad network listeners and telemetry enabled by default, the practical solution for owners is straightforward: sever the television's internet connection entirely and treat the panel as a dumb display fed by an isolated streaming box. LG has not commented on the findings as of writing.