LG Electronics issued a formal response on September 12, 2026, addressing allegations that its smart TVs monitor private household activity. The company characterized recent reports of audio surveillance as “misconceptions,” specifically denying that its hardware “continuously record[s] or transmit[s] users’ conversations.”
The controversy follows a joint investigation by researchers at Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs, which utilized retail units of the flagship 2025/2026 LG OLED G5. While LG claims its voice assistant features only activate upon hearing a wake word like “Hi LG,” researchers reported finding evidence of plain-text transcripts of ambient room conversations stored on the device while it appeared to be in a low-power standby mode.
LG’s defense hinges on the distinction between local processing and cloud transmission. According to the company, wake-word detection is handled locally on the TV, and audio data is deleted if the trigger phrase is not recognized. However, the technical investigation suggested that local buffering—saving audio snippets to the TV’s internal memory before a wake word is spoken—creates a repository of data that can be accessed through security vulnerabilities.
Beyond audio concerns, the investigation highlighted LG’s “network scanning” behavior. LG confirmed its TVs scan local home networks to identify other connected devices, such as smartphones, smartwatches, and printers. LG describes this as a “standard function” intended to improve device connectivity and smart-home integration. According to reported figures from LG Ad Solutions, the company’s advertising arm, this data harvesting provides visibility into roughly 363 million secondary addressable devices globally.
This scrutiny arrives months after LG reached a settlement with the Office of the Texas Attorney General in May 2026. That agreement addressed claims that LG utilized Automatic Content Recognition (ACR)—a system that fingerprints content from external HDMI inputs—without obtaining proper informed consent from consumers.
Researchers also identified specific remote code execution (RCE) flaws during their testing of the G5 models. These vulnerabilities can potentially allow unauthorized parties to bypass privacy toggles, effectively keeping the microphone active even when voice detection is disabled in the settings menu. While LG maintains that ACR and voice features are opt-in and not enabled by default, the research findings suggest that “Live Plus” and other data-tracking services are frequently active unless a user manually navigates deep into sub-menus to disable them.
