A September investigation by Gamers Nexus, working with security researchers, has put LG’s smart TVs under scrutiny – and what they found is alarming.
LG’s televisions don’t just track which shows you watch. They take snapshots of the screen, record audio, and send it all back to LG for advertising. The company’s ad division claims data from 216 million LG TVs worldwide.
It gets worse. Researchers found the TVs capturing:
- Plaintext transcripts of ordinary conversations, not just voice commands
- Audio recorded even when the TV appeared to be switched off
- Footage from a connected webcam
- Scans of your home network, spotting phones, watches and other devices
- Your location and details of nearby Wi-Fi networks
The audio is stored on the TV when it’s offline, then uploaded once it reconnects. And because of flaws in webOS, LG’s operating system, the researchers could pull that audio and listen in themselves – meaning a hacker potentially could too. Test phrases like “my social security number is…” turned up sitting in the TV’s memory as plain text.
Using an Apple TV box instead won’t save you. The spying happens at the television level, so the streaming device you plug in makes no difference.
The only reliable fix is to make your TV “dumb”. Unplug the Ethernet cable and switch off Wi-Fi in the settings so it can’t forget your details and reconnect. If you’re comfortable with your router, firewall rules can block these connections across every LG screen in the house at once.
LG says it’s working on the security holes. But the data harvesting has run for years, and it won’t stop until customers push back hard enough – or until it stops being profitable.
source: https://appleinsider.com/
Supporting YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToP9xfLDSME