LG Smart TVs Under Fire: Privacy and Security Concerns Persist in 2025

Smart televisions have long been scrutinized for their data‑gathering habits, but a renewed wave of investigations in 2024‑2025 shows that LG’s OLED and LED models continue to collect extensive personal information—often without clear user consent. From microphone eavesdropping to network sniffing, the findings raise serious questions about how much control consumers really have over their own living‑room devices.

The Scope of Data Collection: What LG’s Smart TVs Are Really Doing

LG’s smart TV platform, webOS, includes a suite of features designed to enhance the viewing experience—personalized recommendations, voice control, and automatic content recognition (ACR). However, testing by security researchers and media outlets such as Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs revealed that these functions go far beyond simple usage logging. The TVs routinely:

• Capture raw audio streams from built‑in microphones and, when a webcam is attached, from that device as well.
• Transcribe spoken words into plaintext stored in memory, even when the user is not issuing a voice command.
• Scan the local Wi‑Fi network for other devices, recording signal strength, channel numbers, and MAC addresses.
• Determine the television’s geographic location via IP‑based geolocation and nearby wireless networks.
• Collect viewing data through ACR, which periodically takes screenshots or audio fingerprints of on‑screen content and sends them to LG’s analytics servers.

All of this information is transmitted to LG’s ad‑solutions division, which claims to hold data from over 200 million smart televisions worldwide, including tens of millions in the United States.

From Microphones to Network Scanning: Specific Privacy Violations Uncovered

The investigative work uncovered several especially troubling behaviors:

• Ambient audio recording: Microphones remained active in standby mode, capturing snippets of conversation that were later uploaded once the TV reconnected to the internet.
• Webcam hijacking: When a USB webcam was connected for video conferencing, the TV could route its audio feed into the same collection pipeline.
• Plaintext logs of sensitive phrases: Researchers found stored transcripts containing statements like “my social security number is…” and “my credit card information” in the TV’s memory.
• Network reconnaissance: The TV performed ARP scans and queried neighboring devices, effectively mapping the home network.
• Geolocation tracking: By correlating Wi‑Fi signal strength with known hotspot databases, the set‑top box could infer a user’s rough location.

These activities occurred regardless of whether the viewer was actively using smart TV features, suggesting that data collection is deeply embedded in the firmware rather than tied to opt‑in services.

Security Risks: How Collected Data Could Be Exploited

Beyond privacy concerns, the way LG handles this data introduces potential security weaknesses:

• Audio snippets and transcripts are stored locally in unencrypted form before upload, making them accessible to anyone with physical or remote access to the TV’s file system.
• Vulnerabilities in older versions of webOS have been shown to allow attackers to pull these logs via network exploits, turning the television into a covert listening post.
• The network‑scanning behavior could reveal the presence of other smart devices, potentially assisting an attacker in identifying weak points within a home’s IoT ecosystem.
• Geolocation data, combined with viewing habits, could be used to build detailed profiles for targeted advertising—or worse, for social engineering attacks.

While LG maintains that its data practices are intended to improve product functionality and that users can disable certain features through the settings menu, critics argue that the toggles are obscure, poorly documented, and do not fully halt the underlying data collection mechanisms.

Practical Steps to Limit Tracking and Protect Your Privacy

For consumers who wish to reduce the data footprint of their LG smart TV, several mitigation strategies are available:

1. Disable wireless connections: Unplug the Ethernet cable and, via the TV’s network settings, tell the set‑top box to forget any saved Wi‑Fi credentials. This prevents both outgoing data transmissions and inbound network scans.
2. Turn off voice‑related features: Navigate to Settings → General → Voice Recognition and disable “Voice Recognition” and “Voice Output.” While this does not guarantee the microphone is powered off, it stops the TV from processing audio for commands.
3. Block outgoing traffic at the router: If physically accessing the TV is impractical, create firewall rules on your home router to deny all outbound connections from the TV’s IP address to LG’s domains (e.g., *.lge.com, *.lgad.solutions).
4. Use a separate streaming device: Rely on an external box such as Apple TV, Roku, or a gaming console for all streaming content, and keep the TV’s smart platform in a “dumb” state (no network connection).
5. Regularly check for firmware updates: Although LG has not released a specific patch addressing the microphone and ACR concerns as of September 2025, keeping the firmware current ensures you receive any general security fixes.
6. Consider a network‑wide VPN or Pi‑hole: Routing the TV’s traffic through a VPN that blocks known telemetry endpoints, or deploying a DNS‑sinkhole like Pi‑hole, can further curb unwanted data exfiltration.

Even with these steps, some data may still be stored locally until the TV regains internet access. The most certain way to eliminate the risk is to keep the television completely offline.

Looking Ahead: Regulatory Pressure and the Future of Smart TV Privacy

The revelations about LG’s data practices have added to growing scrutiny of the smart‑TV industry as a whole. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has previously warned manufacturers about deceptive data‑collection practices, and several state attorneys general have signaled interest in examining whether current disclosures meet legal standards for informed consent. Internationally, the European Union’s GDPR continues to impose strict requirements on any processing of personal data, including audio recordings and location information.

Consumer advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Privacy International have renewed calls for clearer opt‑out mechanisms, mandatory data‑minimization, and regular third‑party audits of smart‑TV firmware. While LG has not announced any major policy changes in response to the latest investigations, the sustained media attention and potential legal exposure may push the company toward more transparent data‑handling practices in future firmware releases.

For now, the safest approach remains treating the television as a display device rather than a fully connected smart hub—especially when privacy is a priority.

Electronics, Internet, Telecom, Society, Law