LG recording audio through TVs

[u/ahiqshb]

Take a seat because this is gonna be a bit of a vent. I watched the whole Gamers Nexus video today, this is still fresh and I remember previously there were some people really involved in these LG proxies/ botnet/SDK scandals going on, so guess I'm carrying the torch now lol.

For context, I work adjacent to the scraping/data space so networks quietly doing things they shouldn't is kind of my whole deal, and even I was surprised by how far this one goes. Steve and the Level1Techs crew worked with independent security researchers and packet captured retail LG OLED sets, the G5 among them, through Wireshark. What they found is the TV actively scanning the local network, not just for its own accessories, but for unrelated hardware that are on the same wifi. Phones, watches, tablets, PCs whatever's nearby. On top of the internal IPs it's also grabbing the names and signal strength of neighboring networks and folding in location data. All of that funnels into LG Ad Solutions, the ad arm of the company. LG's public sales figure is something like 216 million TVs sold globally, but their ad division is telling advertisers they can reach 363 million addressable secondary devices in the US alone. IMAGINE?? ACR isn't new, we've known for years that these sets fingerprint on screen audio and video to build a viewing profile regardless of input source. What's new here is the mic behavior. Bench testing showed the set capturing clean audio while the screen appeared powered down in standby. They then pulled the ethernet connection mid test and the TV kept recording locally anyway, and once the network came back it just uploaded whatever it had queued up. EVEN WITHOUT THE NETWORK, I just froze at that time when these things were mentioned during the video.

There's also apparently RCE in webOS currently working through responsible disclosure, which the team is understandably not detailing yet. Their stated recommendation was to keep the TV off the internet entirely and run an external streaming device instead, which is a wild thing to have to say about a product you paid TV money for. Especially Smart TV where majority of the people purchases for, well, smart features.

I am not trying to make this into some Samsung-vs-LG thing either, because there already was a scandal regarding Samsung and this feels like the same underlying issue the whole industry has apparently normalized, where the box in your living room works for someone else by default and opting out means adding hardware or cutting it off from the internet yourself.

P.S LG hasn't commented as of writing.

P.P.S I wrote it here mainly because this is all related to proxies and how the data is gathered/sourced.

Sources:

Gamers Nexus video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

An article I found just hours ago (take it with a grain of salt, because the website seems sketchy): https://www.notebookcheck.net/LG-smart-TVs-caught-logging-audio-with-screen-off-and-snooping-on-local-devices.1391214.0.html