LG’s statement to Tom’s Hardware on 9 September 2026 opens with a line that stuck with me: “The claims made in the recently published video are” — and from there the company goes on to reject the idea that its smart TVs constantly log and upload user data or record audio while sitting in standby. Tracking and snooping concerns, LG says, are “not true.” In the same breath, the company confirms that its TVs do scan the local network.
That combination is the whole story for me. A flat denial, paired with a confirmation of the one behavior that, as someone who writes device-discovery code for a living, I find the most interesting.
Denial and confirmation in the same paragraph
The claims came out of work by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers, who described LG TVs logging and uploading data about their users. An online investigation attached a big number to it: 216,000,000 TVs allegedly spying and recording audio. LG’s response, covered by The Verge and Tom’s Hardware, disputes the recording-in-standby part and says voice data collection is opt-in and requires activation.
Two different arguments are being made and they are easy to conflate. One is about audio. The other is about network visibility. LG pushed back hard on the first and quietly acknowledged the second. If you build bots or home automation, you already know these are not the same threat model, and that the second one is not automatically benign just because it isn’t a microphone.
Why network scanning is not a smoking gun, and not nothing either
Every device that wants to find your speakers, your phone, or your console does some version of local discovery. I write that code. It is how a bot finds the printer, how a media app finds the TV, how a smart plug gets adopted into a hub. Scanning the LAN is ordinary plumbing.
What separates plumbing from surveillance is not the scan. It is three questions:
- Does the result stay on the device, or does it go to a server?
- Is it tied to an account or a stable identifier?
- How long does it live once it leaves the house?
A discovery scan that populates a local cache and dies on reboot is a feature. The same scan, uploaded and joined to a profile, becomes a household inventory. LG confirming the scan happens tells us the mechanism exists. It does not tell us which of those three answers applies, and the public statement doesn’t resolve it either.
Opt-in is a promise about defaults, not about capability
LG’s line that voice collection is opt-in and requires activation is worth taking at face value while also understanding what it does and doesn’t cover. Opt-in describes a default state. It says nothing about what the code can do once the flag flips, where the data goes after that, or how discoverable the toggle was during setup.
I have shipped features behind flags. The flag is the easy part. The hard part is the honest accounting of what happens on the other side of it, and that accounting rarely makes it into a press statement.
The rooting detour
One of the follow-on discussions, a Gamers Nexus piece on why rooting your TV is a bad idea, deserves attention from the tinkerer crowd. The instinct when you distrust a device is to crack it open. On a TV, that trade often costs you more than it buys: you take on update responsibility, you can lose the security boundaries that were doing useful work, and you end up with a permanently unpatched appliance on the same subnet as everything else you own.
The Hacker News threads ran to 359 and 133 comments on the two topics, which tells you how live this argument is among people who actually read packet captures.
What I’d do instead, as a builder
Distrust is not a strategy. Segmentation is. Put the appliances on their own VLAN or guest network and let your bots talk to them through a broker you control rather than letting them talk to the internet directly. If your automation needs to know the TV’s state, get that from your own hub, not from a cloud API you cannot audit.
And apply the same standard to your own projects. When I write a bot that touches a home network, I try to hold myself to what I’d want from LG: discovery results stay local unless there’s a stated reason to send them, telemetry defaults to off, the log of what leaves the device is readable by the person who owns it, and voice capture is explicit every time rather than once at setup.
LG may be entirely correct that the standby-recording claims are false. Both things can be true: the loudest accusation is wrong and the quiet confirmation still deserves a real answer. Solid engineering means designing so that the answer is verifiable, not just stated.
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