The television was mapping the house, and in one test it kept recording with the screen off
A smart TV is a computer that nobody patches, sitting on the same network as everything else you own. That is the uncomfortable premise behind an investigation Gamers Nexus published on 7 September, done with Level1Techs and independent security researchers. They put several LG OLED models on a bench, including the G5, ran packet captures with Wireshark, pulled the firmware apart and followed where the traffic went.
What the sets were doing goes well past knowing what you watched. They identified other devices on the local network: phones, PCs, printers, switches, smart-home gear. They collected the names and signal strengths of nearby Wi-Fi networks, which is enough to place a house on a map. Automated Content Recognition fingerprinted whatever appeared on screen. Then the finding that made the headlines: the researchers captured clean microphone audio while the screen was, or at least looked, powered down in standby. When the TV was cut off from the internet it held the audio locally and uploaded it once the connection came back. The team also reported remote code execution flaws in webOS to LG, and is withholding the details while that disclosure runs its course. For scale, LG has sold roughly 216 million smart TVs, and its advertising arm markets access to 363 million secondary addressable devices in the US alone, which is the polite name for everything else your telly can see. LG has not commented.
The researchers' own advice was blunt: take the TV off the internet and use a separate streaming stick for apps, since a stick is cheap and easy to replace once it stops getting updates. Short of that, dig through the settings and switch off voice recognition and anything described as viewing information or content recognition, install firmware updates when they appear, and turn UPnP off on your router unless something genuinely needs it.
Most people have no idea how much is quietly connected to their home network. Tendvane's Network scan lists what is actually on yours, which is usually the moment a TV, a doorbell and two things nobody remembers buying turn up on the same page.