I've had this LG smart TV story sitting open in a browser tab since the second week of September, and I finally made myself sit down and read the whole thing properly last night instead of just skimming headlines on my phone in bed, which is how I read most tech news these days and I'm not proud of it.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs ran an investigation into LG's smart TVs (webOS, the usual deal on basically every midrange LG set sold since around 2019) and found that after you use the voice assistant once, the mic doesn't fully go back to sleep. It keeps picking up ambient conversation, converts it to text, and dumps that text into the TV's own system logs. Not "sends it to LG," at least not that they could prove, just logs it, locally. Which is somehow both less alarming and more unsettling than I expected. One of the TVs they tested also scanned the home Wi-Fi network and found 38 other devices on it, which LG says is just normal smart-home device discovery and not snooping. Sure.
LG's statement was the classic non-denial denial: "The claims made in the recently published video are not true." Not true how, exactly? They said wake-word audio that doesn't match gets processed on-device and deleted, which, fine, maybe, but that doesn't actually address the part where researchers found logged transcripts of room conversations after the wake word. Those are two different claims and LG only responded to one of them. I've read that statement four times now and it still doesn't say what I want it to say.
Scale-wise we're talking about something like 216 million LG TVs worldwide and 49 million in the US alone, going by LG's own numbers. That's not a niche gadget issue. That's half the TVs in American living rooms, roughly.
Here's my actual opinion, not the hedge-everything version: I think smart TVs are a bad trade and have been for years, and this is just the most recent proof. You're handing over a live microphone and a persistent network scanner in exchange for a slightly nicer menu system and a free ad-supported channel you'll watch twice. I still use a 2017 LG OLED in my home office that I deliberately never connected to Wi-Fi, and it's honestly the most relaxing screen in my house precisely because it can't phone home. My living room TV is a newer Samsung that's absolutely got ACR turned on by default, and I keep meaning to dig through the settings menu to kill it and keep putting it off because the toggle is buried four menus deep under three different marketing names for the same feature. That's the real trick these companies pull. It's not that the privacy controls don't exist. It's that finding them takes longer than most people will spend on a Tuesday night.
What bugs me most isn't even the mic thing, it's the Wi-Fi scanning. A TV mapping every device on your home network and reporting back on what it finds is a much bigger deal than people are treating it as, and almost nobody's talking about that part. Everyone jumped straight to "is my TV listening to me" because that's the scarier, more visceral framing, and fair enough, it is scarier. But device fingerprinting across your whole home network is arguably the more useful data for whoever's collecting it, and it's getting a fraction of the attention it deserves.
No regulatory action yet as of this week that I've seen, no confirmed fix, just LG saying it's not true and the researchers standing by their findings. I don't expect that to change before the holidays, when everyone's buying new TVs anyway and nobody reads the privacy policy before checking out at Best Buy.
If you're shopping for a TV this fall, my only actual advice is the boring kind: buy the TV, don't ever connect it to your Wi-Fi, and plug in whatever streaming box you already trust instead. Do that and the "smart" features on the TV itself become a non-issue, because they've got nothing to talk to. It's not elegant. It works, and that's enough for me.