I've had an LG OLED sitting in the living room for about three years now, and until last week I never once looked at what it was actually doing on my network. Then that whole LG "spy TV" thing blew up - Gamers Nexus and a few security researchers put together a report claiming LG TVs record ambient audio even in standby, log nearby Wi-Fi networks, and basically treat your living room like a research lab. LG came back and said the claims were "not true," except then admitted the TVs do scan the local network and do listen for the wake word while sitting in standby. So... not exactly a full denial, is it.
I'm not going to pretend I read the whole investigation report line by line. But it bugged me enough that I finally did something I'd been meaning to do since I set up Pi-hole two years ago: actually look at what my own TV talks to.
Checking the logs
My home network runs through Pi-hole on the little mini PC I migrated everything to over Labor Day weekend (long story, already covered that disaster in an earlier post). Pi-hole logs every DNS query from every device on the network, which makes this embarrassingly easy to check. I filtered the query log by the TV's hostname and let it sit for a day.
The result wasn't as dramatic as the headlines made it sound, but it wasn't nothing either. My TV was pinging LG's ad and analytics domains roughly every four minutes, round the clock, standby included. Not constant streaming of audio data, nothing that screamed "actively recording you right now" - but a steady, persistent heartbeat to LG's servers that I never agreed to in any meaningful sense. There's a setting buried three menus deep called Live Plus that's supposedly responsible for most of that traffic, and turning it off cut the frequency down a lot but didn't kill it entirely.
If you want to try this yourself without Pi-hole, your router's admin page probably has some kind of client traffic or DNS log, even if it's uglier to read than Pi-hole's. Or run tcpdump on a spare Raspberry Pi sitting between your TV and the router for an hour and grep for anything with "lge" or "lgsmartad" in the hostname. You'll be surprised how chatty a device that's supposedly off can be.
The part that actually annoys me
What gets me isn't that there's tracking happening at all. At this point I assume every smart device phones home constantly, and I've made peace with that in the depressing way you make peace with things you can't fix. What annoys me is how buried the opt-outs are. Turning off Live Plus, turning off viewing data collection, resetting the ad ID, none of those settings live in one place, and LG's own privacy menu steers you toward "allow everything" with bigger, friendlier buttons than the deny options ever get. That's not an accident. Someone got paid to design that screen.
I ended up doing the thing every privacy nerd eventually does: I put the TV on its own VLAN with no internet access and just feed it video over HDMI from a different box. It can't call home if it can't reach the front door. A bit annoying to set up if your router doesn't do VLANs out of the box, but mine does, so it took about twenty minutes once I found the right settings page, most of which was spent swearing at a config menu clearly designed by someone who has never once used it themselves.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as the "216 million spy TVs" framing a couple of outlets ran with this week. That number is doing a lot of work for one headline, and framing it that way makes it easy for LG to just say "not true" and move on, which is exactly what happened. But the underlying behavior is real, and it took me fifteen minutes with logs I already had sitting on my own network to confirm it, rather than trusting a corporate statement about what its own hardware does inside my house. If you've got any kind of DNS logging already running at home, go look. You probably own a chattier TV than you think you do.