LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby | Hacker News Reader

LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby

theverge.com

589 pointssbulaev359 comments

There have been quite a few submissions on this topic. The biggest one is:

216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375 - Sept 2026 (971 comments so far)

(Normally we'd merge this one thither but it's already so big maybe we'll just treat it as a follow-up)

The weird thing is that this pretty huge story has essentially zero visibility to the public until now since it's only been covered in tech media. I wonder how long it'll take for general-public media to wake up to it to warn the masses?

Yes and secondarily weird is why there was a flurry of these all at once. I mean it's probably just the usual group dynamics but it would be interesting to know what precipitated it, and why now.

In terms of mass media coverage, if this really is the bingo-card GDPR violation it appears to be then the fines for LG will be... staggering, as in corporate-survival-level staggering, which means they'll be fighting it tooth and nail every step of the way. So you'd want to be really, really sure about what you're saying about them before you run it on the front page.

Wasn't it the Gamer's Nexus video? That has a huge audience.

Ah, that would explain it.

I wish there was some regulation that would force TVs to have a "dumb" mode. When the colors on our previous living room TV started to go out my dad ended up buying a new huge Vizio during black friday for really cheap. He left it to me to set up, since I'm the tech guy of the family, as you all probably understand.

I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in (or at the very least the option was so well hidden I didn't see one). Of course the sign up asks for PII like my name and phone number.

Vizio was bought out by Walmart a while back, with the intent of expanding Walmart's advertising empire.

It's really unfortunate that the TV market has ended up the way it has. My family still has a few CRTs going that have been working every day for decades, just turn it on and TV immediately starts playing. I miss that level of simplicity.

I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in

I missed the part of your comment where you put it back in the box and returned it.

(Yeah, I know, understandable reasons. But that's exactly what I would do if it were going in my house.)

The problem is for TV manufacturers to change their ways, a lot of TVs will need to be returned.

And your average Smart TV buyer is prepared to sign into Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Youtube etc - that's the whole point of buying a smart TV. The only returns will be from the minority who are happy to sign up and sign in for streaming services, but who balk at one more account.

Personally, I'm about to return a smart TV (because it sucks) and replace it with a dumb screen. But realistically - I don't imagine these things get returned in sufficient numbers for vendors to change their ways.

It starts with one.

I think we won't get meaningful change until a data broker gets hacked and a huge number of people (including elected officials), have their data on display for all to see.

Why do you think the current admin is always creating so many distractions?

That has been happening for years.

When have massive leaks ever caused any real change?

> your average Smart TV buyer is prepared to sign into Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Youtube etc

I think this is starting to change a bit especially as companies crack down on password sharing. Once the dam breaks, there's gonna be a pretty drastic and unstoppable migration towards the "dumb" TV products + more open alternatives. I'm already seeing a lot of families start to move to DVDs and Blurays for kids who just watch the same 5 movies on repeat anyway.

This migration is already happening away from Windows. Gaming was the big moat that Windows had but now with Steam Proton and better Linux alternatives, a ton of people are starting to move away and while it's not a significant majority yet, I think the tides have already turned and there's not much Microsoft can do to turn it back.

My research is a few months old, but at the time Vizio looked like the least bad option, largely because a lawsuit had pushed them to narrow what they collect.

"Commercial displays" are "dumb mode" TVs. Alternatively, you can get an Apple TV and keep the TV off networks or in network jail.

Samsungs commercial grade signage displays have become quite smart and so have LGs.

> commercial grade signage displays

If there is ever a campaign where people smash these, I’m in.

Driving around a shopping strip while the damn things flash and change is awful. It’s distracting too, and seems likely to cause crashes.

Network jail isn't a 100% for these -- in their testing, they determined that they could connect to the public Comcast networks that Comcast tries to blanket areas with. So even if you don't let it access your own networks, it will look for other ways to phone home.

No, they did not find this. They speculated that in the future the tvs "could" do that and that there is precedent with other devices. But despite this being repeated over and over as fact, it is in fact not proven to be the case.

The point is more that LG has proven fully untrustworthy so the fact that it is possible is troubling.

And ofc, an adversary can operate that way.

Yes, it's extremely troubling, and not constrained to tv manufacturers. We need some sort of legal overhaul to protect people from this sort of thing.

For example, I was looking at Bird scooters/e-bikes while travelling since they were the local provider of rentable bikes. I noticed a particularly aggressive EULA declaration in their app and decide to skim through the EULA. In it, they had language that stated that I gave them unlimited rights to my likeness and voice. So by clicking this EULA this company could then harvest any photos of me, interviews, what have you, clone my voice or likeness with AI, use it for ads or even sell it to others to use! Needles to say I uninstalled instead of agreeing.

But how many other things did I unknowingly sign to in these EULAs? It's genuinely crazy.

It really should be even in the FCC's interest to clamp down on unwanted transmissions just to keep the airwaves from being needlessly filled.

> Alternatively, you can get an Apple TV and keep the TV off networks or in network jail.

The problem is that a lot of TVs won't even let you use it that way without signing in or downloading an app first. My Vizio wouldn't do anything until I acknowledged a terms of service screen. The only way I could do that was by downloading the Vizio app and connecting it to my network.

I would march it back to the store in that situation.

They are getting away with this shit because the return rates are low.

Bumping up the return rate isn't something you can count on others to do; if you don't return it, you're part of the problem.

The cost of returning the thing to the store can be high.

The packaging can be precarious; what was once stapled cardboard is now taped, what was once a neat and rigid rectangle is now kind of floppy and misshapen and getting worse every time it moves.

Besides, they're big things that can be challenging to move around. Doing it solo is mostly a non-starter.

But sure: Eventually, it gets wheeled back in through the same front door of the store that it came out of just a few hours before.

Now the real fun starts: They don't want it back. They hem and haw. Other associates arrive to reinforce the ultimately firm standpoint of "No."

You point at the return policy on the wall. You read the relevant passages aloud, word by word. You tell them, over and over again, that you're here to return merchandise.

Some smart-sounding person shows up, gives everything an appraisal, and explains "Sir, it even says DO NOT RETURN TO STORE right here on the box!"

It's not clear who got loud first, but it's quite obviously the case that things are definitely loud now.

Finally, the store manager appears. He just needs this fucking circus to end. He asks no questions, issues the refund without hesitation, and everyone walks away pissed off.

---

I mean, I guess that's resolution.

But what often happens instead is this: The TV is unpacked. It's mounted on the wall or arranged just-so on whatever furniture is involved, requiring sometimes-tricky bits of assembly the whole way through. There's excited anticipation in the air about the new widget and how much better it is going to be than the old widget.

Finally, you switch it on and discover that it can't proceed without a network login. This raises a series of red flags that you find impossible to ignore.

So you go out back to cool off for a few minutes, think about life's decisions, and Google ways to get this 2026 build of this TV that nobody online ever mentions the specific model number of to work offline without any connection.

And the missus knows how these things can go. So while that's happening, she signs the thing into the network and gets it set up with an account "just to see how it really works."

Now the TV is connected and it's never going back to the store.

The end.

Mounting on the wall is just four screws to the TV, with a standard bolt pattern that fits any modern TV. Whatever accomodations were made will work exactly the same with any TV of approximately the same size.

Yeah, that sounds great.

It does not match reality. It's trivial to find modern televisions that don't follow VESA's mounting hole patterns.

Since the mounting hardware you already have from your previous TV does follow VESA, you would be returning the new one for that reason.

Unless, you know, it was amazing, like completely dumb with no registration step, and offering great picture quality. That might be worth drilling some new holes in the mounting plate, or whatever it takes to make it work.

You win. Whatever game you're playing, you're the victor.

Congratulations!

When I say returning, of course I mean not buying in the first place! "Does it have a standard bolt pattern compatible with my intended mount" is one of the first things you check for in the technical specs, long before you order something or go pick it up. If your mount is strictly 100x100, you can't have a larger TV on it that has a 200x100 or 200x200.

Are you speaking from experience or are you letting your fantasy run wild before even trying?

I've been a consumer of electronic goods for several decades, I have returned many things to stores, I've installed televisions professionally, and I've had one or more missuses.

Is there any merit to pinning me down on this matter?

Do you want me to start asking you the questions, instead?

Dammit, can't I just post on the Internet without constantly being checked for facts and strawman arguments?

You already won.

Please accept your victory.

I work in the refurb department of an ewaste recycling company. I had a TV on a roller stand come in some months ago. When I turned it on, I realized that it wasn't any ordinary consumer-grade TV, but a commercial grade one. It lacked any sort of smart functionality, had no apps, and reported DCI 4K resolution (4096x2160) when connected to a PC. I found a remote that worked with it (even though it was a 'smart' TV remote). I listed it as a "dumb TV" for $200 and it took a while to sell.

> and reported DCI 4K resolution (4096x2160) when connected to a PC

Was that the actual panel resolution though? Because my 4K Samsung consumer TV also reports 4096x2160 resolutions in its EDID and will accept that input (but the native 3840x2160 is marked as preferred). It would be surprising if there were entirely separate panels used only for commercial displays.

> I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in (or at the very least the option was so well hidden I didn't see one). Of course the sign up asks for PII like my name and phone number.

The only solution we have to this is to return the TV as defective and buy something else until you find something that works without an account or an app. A sane country would have regulations that make spying on you illegal but our government works for corporations instead of the public so they'll never protect us when there's money to be made off of us.

> our government works for corporations instead of the public

Yes, but we cheat ourselves out of change with learned helplessness. Did you see how much hatred the business community directed at Lina Khan when she started dusting off the old antitrust machinery? That happened recently. It can happen again. It was on the ballot, and it will be again.

> Did you see how much hatred the business community directed at Lina Khan

Lina Khan truly has the interests of consumers at heart.

The hatred was not just right-wing. Many lefties hated her, too.

The common thread seems to be billionaires.

Yes, I saw that too, it was quite remarkable. Still, learned helplessness would have us believe that such an appointment was impossible and yet it happened, and it happened in a Democratic party that leaned "more lib than left" to an even greater degree than it does today, or will in 2028.

So when the billionaires twirl their moustaches and say "Silly kids! You can't possibly defeat me, why do you even try?" (or, more realistically, sponsor a lackey to promote that message) one should try to have at least as much gumption as a child facing down a cartoon villain who recognizes this as smack talk rather than deep philosophical truth. The progressives of 100 years ago faced down the first round of Robber Barons and won. We've done this before and we can do it again.

You'll notice that this was not a popular discussion.

HN users don't like it when billionaires are dissed, as many want to achieve that, for themselves. Very much a reflection on the demographics of this site. Maybe not a bad thing, but kind of amusing.

Even if every single person who wants dumb TVs bought a smart TV and returned it as defective, I doubt it would even be a noticeable increase to the number of defective TVs returned.

False premise. Many (most?) smart TVs will work without first connecting them to the network.

That's not related to my premise at all.

This is one of the many reasons I haven't owned a TV for the last 5 years. I just watch stuff on the computer, or not at all. It's actually nice not having it looming over me.

I love my friend’s house that has no TV and that’s exactly what they do. The room aesthetically looks so nice without the screen in it.

However, the laptop solution tends to only work if you’re single or have no family. The TV is unfortunately a very useful device.

Projectors are still valid, and often superior, alternatives to TVs.

They’re definitely more work to get right though

Welp... I bought recently a projector.

It wouldn't start in a dumb mode without first establishing internet connection and a Google account.

Interesting idea I never thought of, though for my purposes my room gets way too much natural light for a projector to be viable.

blackout shades go a long way, but if you’ve got huge bay windows that’s probably too much.

If it’s close to good, and you need a little more brightness, there are newer screens that reflect much more light. more reflective = pricier, but there’s a decent value/sweet spot.

Huge floor to ceiling windows is exactly what I have. Of course I also don’t want to make my room pitch black just to watch TV.

It’s good to know that there are solutions designed for high-light situations, though.

There are ambient light rejection (ALR) screens available now that make projectors viable even under bright lights. Problem is, the decent ones are quite pricey, sometimes costing almost as much as the projector themselves. You could easily buy two OLED TVs for the price of a decent short throw laser projector + ALR.

The other issue issue is that most, if not all, modern projectors are also "smart", so you may run into the same privacy issues as TVs...

Maybe the best option is to just buy a PC monitor and pair it up with decent speakers, the only issue being you can't get larger screens like TVs.

Yeah the projector doesn’t quite save on room aesthetics if I need whole screen setup, unless I spend even more to make it super hidden and seamless in the room.

I’ve just found that disabling network connectivity and going with an external streaming box is the best compromise of the moment.

On LG it’s important to never agree to the terms and conditions. I’m not sure if they still allow you to do that on new TV sets. It’s very disturbing to find out that the TV is queueing up data to send home even while offline.

The Apple TV streaming box seems to be the least privacy-invasive, mostly ad-free, mainstream easy to use option on the market, but it’s certainly not perfect in that regard.

How is projector superior? More often than not, with the same amount of money spent, projector produces worse image quality, consumes more power, and don't last as long.

Projectors can never come even remotely close to the contrast of an OLED. That's an inherent limitation of requiring a reflective display surface and not something that can be fixed with better technology.

LG recently was in the news for loading Microsoft's utility/driver update mechanism with crapware that auto installs (by default) when you hitch one of their monitors to a Windows PC. I fear they just haven't gotten around to fully abusing monitor users yet.

That's just your computer having the same who-is-the-owner issue as a smart TV.

The awful part is that streaming has pretty much ruined TV. There's hardly any new good shows on TV, and many channels have just become the same show on 24/7.

It would be one thing if we maintained the same quality of service that TV had and had streaming as an alternative, but streaming has pretty much replaced TV. Every channel always has ads for their streaming service. It's bleak.

You can literally just buy a Sony and do this. And several other manufacturers that run Google TV can be switched to dumb mode.

Sony tv with an AppleTV and a pihole.

The dumb mode is when you unplug it from the wall

There is no obligation to be truthful when it comes to providing PII for advertising. Register using a throwaway email. If an app install is mandatory, use an android emulator (set an uuid if needed). Ideally, the tv won't have ongoing internet access beyond what's required for initial setup. If not possible, at least use PiHole or similar to block telemetry.

You will still need to agree to the offline spying ToS

This sort of thing should be labelled.

Just as food has warnings (too much sugar, too much salt, etc), so electronics should be labelled: "requires online registration" and "captures conversations" and "scans your network".

That's not enough. We don't allow food companies to just slap on "contains lead" and keep selling poison. And if every device has this label it just becomes useless.

I have a pretty nice Samsung that I purchased maybe 5 years ago. When I initially purchased it, it was great. No account needed. Did every thing I wanted from a TV (I want it to be dumb)

I refused to update it, because I knew that at some point they would add mandatory accounts or other bloatware. Fantastic for 2 years or so.

My gf started living with me and updated it accidentally/didn't know. It now has it's own entire OS that requires 2 accounts - a Google account and a Samsung account, I believe. Devastating.

Mandatory accounts for everything. Forcing people to download certain applications. Turning off functionality if there's no subscription to X or Y. I feel we really started to take a step back for software usefulness in the late 20teens...

Factory reset?

And if that doesn't work, RMA and/or small claims because breaking your device through an update shouldn't be legal.

Never let your TV know your wifi password. Use a firestick or a little PC for streaming, etc.

I read they’ll find xfinitywifi or any open access point and do it without your consent

If you join them to a black holed or tarpit said I wonder if that protects against connecting elsewhere.

Sure you can connect, but you’ll find all your tcp connections dying.

Enjoy watching a spinning wheel for the whole time then "Your TV is trying to connect..."

I've had great success blackholing and haven't seen this.

I have an LG I bought around three years ago. The first year-ish it was connected to the internet normally. That's when I first heard about the LG spying issue, and also had noticed that the TV seemed to slow down a bit with every new update it got (what a surprise).

I then isolated it to its own VLAN with no internet access whatsoever. Only other device on the same VLAN is a virtual interface on my Home Assistant server that allows me to keep using the LG webos integration and send Wake on LAN packets to the TV.

Surprisingly most of the slowness seemed to also disappear after cutting the TV from the internet. It's probably not quite as fast as it was when it was brand new, but the most noticeable difference is when turning the TV on. It's almost instant again now, compared to something like 5+ seconds it took when it had internet.

You can read a lot and this is a real possibility, but I have yet to see any evidence that this has happened yet.

You let Facebook pass... What to expect?

My two year old Samsung still works as a dumb display. I think it would even do cable or OTA TV without any smart nonsense but I have no need for that. Trying to use "smart" features like voice control pops up a consent form that I just never accepted so maybe that's what happened to you.

I have a 12-year-old Samsung TV I got off Craigslist for under $100 that displays images, and that's it. Oh, and it plays video off a USB stick if you plug one in.

Friend of mine used to hassle me about my TV, and how his one has much better colour saturation and soundstage and notes of vanilla, toast, smoked bacon, and chocolate. It's a network-connected (to make it work) LG smart TV...

Well my used-a-dumb-display relatively recent Samsung also has great color saturation and perfect OLED blacks. AFAIK you can use LGs in the same way but I haven't owned one myself. I wouldn't take anyone who cares about the sound of built-in TV speakers too seriously though, especially with everything in there having to be as flat as paper - just get external speakers or at least a sound bar and even average options there will blow any TV out of the water.

> I wish there was some regulation that would force TVs to have a "dumb" mode.

Some manufacturers have "business" lines, for things like kiosks and in-store displays, e.g.:

* https://www.samsung.com/us/business/commercial-tvs/all-comme...

* https://www.samsung.com/ca/business/smart-signage/

Do not use a display made for commercial kiosk use as a tv.

They have terrible response times, brightness levels meant to be seen under sunlight, not for the fine differences of movies.

Some people have reported using them with success.

Those people need better glasses.

Do you have actual benchmarks for that? Bad TV response times usually come for unnecessary signal processing meant to make lower resolution / low frame-rate video look "better" and I don't see why that would be more common rather than less so with commercial displays.

I bought a Hisense TV a few years back and when I set it up, I could not proceed without downloading the companion app. I was curious so I called support and told them that I didn't have a phone and asked how I could activate the TV.

Support had no answer for me other than "well you need the app". When I told them I didn't have a phone to install it on they just said "no that's not correct, you must have a phone..."

You should have told them the required phone was missing from the box.

Given how few people have landlines they probably thought you were trying to prank them.

You can borrow someone's phone or only have a dumbphone.

Of course those are possibilities, as is having a landline. People pranking tech support lines is also a possibility and I suspect a more common one.

More common is companies "pranking" their customers by adding unnecessary smartphone requirements.

If they are concerned about customers pranking support about not having a smartphone they can easily preempt that by not adding a smartphone requirement in the first place.

I am not arguing in favor of corporate apps or smart TVs (which I would not want to buy either). I'm just looking at things from the perspective of the unfortunate person doing tech support, not their corporate overlord.

> "no that's not correct, you must have a phone..."

Well, I guess they were right if you were lying.

That doesn't justify assuming that everyone must have a phone, nor does it make it okay to enforce that people must have a phone to use their goddamn TV

Just because you can call doesn't mean you can install an app, plenty of people use dumb phones

This is a better excuse

This should be an accessibility complaint under the ADA. That should be a big money settlement.

There are numerous disabilities that would cause someone to not have a smartphone capable of running an app. Hell, even addiction to social media or porn could satisfy

Lawsuits only cover actual damage. If you actually did have a phone, their decision to require one caused no harm to you, even if you pretended it did.

"I have a PinePhone with phosh, which is neither Android nor iOS — where can I get the app?"

Obviously, it still won't get you anywhere except maybe hasten the return as it is not compatible to your environment.

> so I called support and told them that I didn't have a phone

Did they ask what device you were calling from? :)

Same with any prepay SIM I'm aware of, to activate it you need a phone because why would anyone ever use a SIM with anything that isn't a phone, like an e-book reader for your elderly mother to read her romance novels on?

And before anyone asks, the reader takes a full-size SIM, the phones take nano-SIMs, and you can't restore it back to a full-size SIM with a shim because the reader won't allow it to be inserted, it just gets mangled as you push it into the slot.

Most TVs don't require an internet connection. I have an LG tv that I have never allowed to connect to the internet. It complains from time to time, but other than that it gives me no problem. It's connected to my PC through which I stream, watch youtube or play video games.

Yes and I wonder for the cases where people claim it did require a connection if it actually did or there were "just" dark patterns that made it appear that way - e.g. it may be that an internet connection is required for some smart feature setup flow but you can skip out of that early by declining the boilerplate all-your-rights-are-belong-to-us legalese that most people just blindly agree to.

My Samsung TV has some stupid voice assistant inside of it called Bixby. Not only is it useless, it's extremely annoying.

I've had multiple experiences where it muted the show I was watching, so that it could try to listen more closely, after being triggered by something said in the show itself. Samsung's software engineers literally built a TV that interrupts itself.

Needless to say, I disabled it. But every week or two, when my TV auto-updates itself, it re-enables Bixby, at least to the degree where it starts listening again, and then mutes whatever I'm watching to ask me if I want to re-enable Bixby.

I would pay 2x for a dumber version of my otherwise-excellent TV.

You mistake was connecting the TV to the internet and accepting the "smart" consent that is required to enable the voice control functionality. Not that that excuses Samsung's behavior but for now you can still use their TVs as dumb screens for a user-respecting device.

> My Samsung TV has some stupid voice assistant inside of it called Bixby.

It'd be seriously cool if someone hacked the Samsung TVs and replaced Bixby with Begbie.

My family bought a big Vizio TV around a year ago (IIRC), and I'm pretty sure we didn't have to sign in to anything for it to work. We didn't connect it to the internet. It often prompts for an update to the remote but the prompt goes away on its own if you don't do anything.

The model is V4K75X-0810 on firmware 86.710.52.1-4. The "Last Update" field says "Dec 31, 1969 04:00 PM" :D

The remote firmware is 6.02.1. I wonder if the reason it prompts for an update is because the TV has a newer remote firmware built-in or if it is just guessing that a newer update is available online.

I don't remember if we had to do anything weird to get the TV to set up without internet.

I agree regulation is probably needed.

The Koreans are taking a huge risk destroying the trust they've built over the last 30 years with this incessant spying and adware. Both LG and Samsung are engaged in this and it could open the door to Chinese rivals like TCL and HiVision. Not because they're much better but because discoveries like these will leave a bad taste in people's mouth whenever they want to buy a new TV.

They need to put a stop to this or they'll start losing market share fast.

Can this spying and tracking be so lucrative that they'll risk alienating their customers over it?

99.99999999% of consumers will not notice any difference

Yeah, sadly most people don’t know or don’t care most likely.

Unless it’s in their face causing them friction they will just continue to use it as an appliance.

I'm sue it's not true, it's probably in the single digits (but they might somewhat influence their friends and family)

Taken literally, you’re claiming that only 80 people on Earth would notice. Maybe a tenth of that if we narrow down what is meant by «consumer». I assume you don’t really believe that?

I see 10 9s so I suppose the claim is 9,999,999,999 people out of 10,000,000,000 won't notice so with 8,000,000,000 people on Earth I think it's 0.8 people not 80.

I think that's a safe assumption

Then you're a hopeless cynic.

They notice the price, that's for sure. That's why these things are so prevalent, 99.999999% are hyper focused on price above all else.

How is this not a gigantic fine from the EU for some kind of GDPR reason

Because it's technically opt-in. And AFAIK the the checkbox is more explicit in Europe and they probably do a bit ore to comply with GDPR. US is a free for all mostly when it comes to abusing consumers through contrived and unfair ToS agreements.

in the US. My LG TV has put up a giant TOS agreement thing and I can't use any apps until I agree. So I unplugged the ethernet cable and bought an Apple TV. problem solved?

For now. I wouldn't surprised that if enough people start doing this, they'll just put a cheap cellular modem in the TV. Or find open access points. Or make a deal with Amazon and others to exfiltrate information via a smart home speaker/assistant.

Technical solutions only go so far, at some point you have to put in place a regulatory framework that requires consent. The divergences between US-EU privacy policies, configuration screens, etc. show that the GDPR is slowly starting to do its work.

What LG (and Samsung and all the other electronics companies) are doing is profiling the user to sell targeted advertising. This is technically not personal information, and that's a grey area for those companies when communicating to the public.

People here generally don't like to hear that, but Apple is doing the very same. There's even a study-paper on how they do this without collecting personal information [0]

So when a company yells out how it's not collecting your "personal information", the statement actually doesn't cover what has been discovered here from all I can decipher from this "research"

[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/learning-with-pri...

> So I unplugged the ethernet cable and bought an Apple TV.

What makes you think the Apple TV is any better? I'd wager that Apple collects just as much telemetry.

No, I don’t think they do. That’s why AppleTV is so expensive compared to a Roku.

Apple has little incentives to do that, though? They make money from selling hardware and are able to charge a premium (more than they could making by stealing and selling private user information) because they have a reputation. It would be very unwise to compromise that for pennies.

LG and other consumer electronics manufacturers have tiny margins compared to Apple so that extra percent or two they can make from stuff like this is pretty big for them.

The opt-in is bollocks. I am a LG owner and quite technical and used to legalese too. This will get them fined in Europe.

The terms of service in Europe [0] are actually very different to those in US [1], I wouldn't be surprised if the behavior within the EU is within EU GDPR regulation.

GDPR "only" covers your personal information (and personal identifiable information) anyway, it doesn't cover data used to profile you (e.g. the time of day the TV and the hours a TV is switched on is technically not personal information)

Either way, case in point: Check this hilarious statement in the US ToS:

"6. I understand and agree that Voice Information may, for the purposes set out above, be transferred to and processed in other countries (including Korea), some of which may not offer the same level of data protection."

Also, this one in the US ToS:

"9. I understand that this Smart Media Product is a household device. If this Smart Media Product will be used by more than one person, I represent that, in addition to agreeing to this Agreement, that I have obtained consent from all other members of my household whose information may be collected through this Smart Media Product and am providing consent on their behalf."

vs. Europe ToS:

"I understand and agree that Voice Information is generally handled by LGE in such a way that members of your household are not identified or identifiable from that information. Please be aware that this means that if several members of your household use Smart Media Product services we may not be able to distinguish you and your personal information from members of your household and those members may be able to see information (including some personal information) you have generated through use of Smart Media Product Services."

[0] https://gb.lgappstv.com/main/terms#tabContentTerms6

[1] https://us.lgappstv.com/main/terms#tabContentTerms6

> How is this not a gigantic fine from the EU for some kind of GDPR reason

The underlying "research" is unfortunately not that clean, but I'd say for two reasons:

1. Because looking at the LG ToS alone, it seems that the devices do MUCH more data-collecting outside Europe

2. GDPR is covering your personal information (WHO you are) and personal identifiable information (data that can be used to infer WHO you are). In a nutshell: If a device (a TV, a phone, a car, a Smart Home device, whatever) collects information to PROFILE you, without collecting data about WHO you are, they are not violating your privacy. The company needs to be VERY careful about not accidentally collecting identifiable information, but as long as this doesn't happen, it's within GDPR.

That said, a proper technical write-up of the issues found, with an investigation by a professional journalist would be very helpful to get things going, put proper pressure where it needs to be and dismantle this Ad network business-model of all those TV-manufacturers (Samsung Ads, LG Ads, TCL Ads, Hisense Ads,...)

> it seems that the devices do MUCH more data-collecting outside Europe

Just a note: GDPR applies globally. Companies can't collect data on Europeans even if they reside on another continent.

As a European that lived in the US for a while, I enjoyed responding to unsolicited marketing emails with GDPR emails to legal departments.

GDPR claims to apply globally, in the same way Windows believes it owns the whole computer, but I'm actually running it in a VM. The actual boundary of GDPR is the intersection of where it says it applies (everyone in Europe and European residents everywhere), where it can be enforced (in Europe, mostly, against European business entities), and what judges will actually rule on (probably not Europeans overseas who misrepresent themselves as locals)

I am not sure about other products. But I have noticed that Samsung phones started putting most toggles off by default (toggles for collecting data). So the GDPR slowly seems to have some effect on different products.

(A few years ago, you definitely had to opt out of data collection.)

Not because they're much better but because discoveries like these will leave a bad taste in people's mouth whenever they want to buy a new TV.

It ain't just TVs. Now that I've found out that my Hyundai is not only spying on me, but snitching to the insurance company, I might just take South Korea companies off my list for anything.

Also applies to GM: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/08/general-moto...

You know who DOESN'T sell the data to outside companies?

Car-vendors which have large competing in-house financial services arms that use the data themselves (VW, BMW, Ford, Stellantis, Tesla,...)

The issue is not a single company, it's that there is insufficient regulation against this.

We should draft such a regulation and call it General Data Protection Regulation. My guess is that we'll see a lot of malicious compliance.

Funny enough, in that one region where this regulation exists, no such incidents of user data being sold was discovered so far...

This spying is even more prevelant in Korean cars, too. Really sad, because they can be a decent enough product (no worse than any other cheap car) but they are very anti consumer and burning their reputation.

Can you elaborate for a Hyundai owner?

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/08/hyundai-and-kia-are-sellin...

Surprise, case was voluntarily dismissed. Wonder how much they paid him.

Also applies to GM: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/08/general-moto...

You know who DOESN'T sell the data to outside companies?

Car-vendors which have large competing in-house financial services arms that use the data themselves (VW, BMW, Ford, Stellantis, Tesla,...)

Oddly enough, historically GM is also easiest to defeat, in just unplugging the OnStar module. No idea on the last couple model years, though.

You mean THIS TCL? https://ads.tcl.com/

Or THIS Hisense? https://nexxen.com/acr-data/

They all use Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) and collect profiling data to feed into an Ad service offering.

Samsung started this and is now a leading supplier for targeted advertising on TVs (because old serialized TV doesn't have such an option), this is forcing all the brands to follow and do the same, because:

#A: it creates a revenue stream based on active devices (like Apple/Google has), not just at the time of sales, and

#B: their business partners now demand it (big electronics chains won't sell a TV which will affect their targeted ad promotions)

It would be much more valuable to have proper journalists (sorry) to write an investigative report on this whole Ad-targeting industry, to create pressure not just on some TV-vendors but on all home appliances (including cable-company set-top-boxes, which do exactly the same btw).

The only way out of this is to increase public pressure to the point that a regulation (a LAW!) is drafted and enforced.

I just recently learned about ACR. My first thought was to set up an LG TV in the basement and stream non-stop p0rn for 3 months or so. Then see what ads start showing up for me. Like, I wonder if there's a target group called "Creeps addicted to p0rn."

just to clarify: ACR is actually not taking a screenshot, it calculates a fingerprint of the picture and sends it to a server.

The fingerprint is then checked against a database of some common content, to understand whether you're watching some Movie/Series on DVD/BluRay or with an external set-top-box.

Not sure if porn is even fingerprinted in that database, would probably be 100% more fingerprints... /s

Watch Netflix Cuties on loop? Since it's Netflix it's probably in the database, yet the internet believes it's legalized child porn. I wouldn't know of course.

That makes me wonder: If someone's ACR-enabled TV shows a lot of CSAM, are the cops gonna come kick down their door?

No, as the point was already made, illegal CSAM isn't in the ACR database.

There are dozens of TV manufacturers in China and the competition is intense. I'm hoping that one manufacturer will come up with the USP to make a TV that doesn't spy on you, doesn't show ads and uses secure software like a microkernel operating system.

Oh and a switching power supply that doesn't fail after two years.

> Not because they're much better

they actually are much better if you have a limited budget

If all this is true, I'd also like to see some serious jail time for those guys that thought this was a good idea. Losing market share should be least of their worries.

Is there anyone who has done a technical write up and investigation into the firmwares?

Like reverse engineering how the software on the TVs work.

Also what third parties are involved.

I have a feeling there must be some third party vendor selling the same toolkit that manufacturers use.

Would be nice to figure out if it's possible to send junk data to the endpoints.

LG for large parts of the product series use WebOS, which was the OS of the shortlived attempt by Palm to compete in the smartphone market with iPhone, which then changed hands a bit till landing there.

Pihole has worked reasonably well upto this point, however the web is catching up, lots of sites that use Admiral refuse to work with piehole running.

I suspect it will only be a matter of time before hardware manufacturers wise up and prevent you from using the TV if you block their ad network traffic.

The smart answer would be to figure out the expected payload of the devices and send a dummy one that tricks the TV into thinking its phoned home, I suspect.

Me too. I was hoping for a better write up than a pay walled verge article. Yes I'm being lazy but this is hn and I like technical break downs and not just moral panic. I own an older lg tv and I'm not dismissing the societal issues.

Gamers Nexus has a 2h video doing reverse engineering and a lot of tests

I'm guessing that's at least (partly) the impetus for why we're seeing these articles now.

by partly you mean entirely

I checked their site and it looks like a write-up hasnt appeared yet. They did a good one for their GPU black market story so hopefully they didnt just forget :)

> Is there anyone who has done a technical write up and investigation into the firmwares?

I extracted the firmware and filesystem of a webOS 3.5 and webOS 24 TV previously so I could remove the spying bits and get an internet connected TV back. I asked Claude Opus 5 to do some analysis on the ACR implementation yesterday. I haven't had time to check it myself, so it might give some insight but take it with a grain of salt. Also because I'm not entirely sure I extracted the complete filesystem for the webOS 24 TV.

See the documents temporarily hosted here [1][2][3]. You can find the Markdown originals in the HTML source. The Markdown has also been pasted here [4] (although the forum software has sometimes inserted a lot of tildes).

LG uses the "Alphonso SDK" for ACR, a company which it seems to have a majority stake in [5].

WebOS itself is actually pretty neat once you get root on the device. It still has open source releases, uses a well documented service bus, the UI apps are unobfuscated Javascript. It's a genuine Linux TV if only LG allowed you to get root and would not install spyware by default. Secure boot unfortunately does prevent you from messing with the boot process.

If you want to know anything specific, let me know. There's also a pretty active Discord (ugh) community here [6].

Personally, I'm most interested whether LG and other device manufacturers are getting informed consent for ACR in European markets, and what the consent screen looks like. I doubt that many consumers actually know what they're consenting to, which might be a GDPR violation.

[1] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/webos-24.html

[2] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/webos-3.5.html

[3] https://scriptbase.org/lg-tv/comparison.html

[4] https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/86090672#8...

[5] https://www.adexchanger.com/tv-2/lg-grabs-a-majority-stake-i...

[6] https://openlgtv.github.io/

Ohhh the WiFi scanning is for geolocation, of course. I was wondering why they'd do that.

It even goes both ways: you can geolocate the user, and you can sell the BSSID data for future lookups. Not sure how valuable that still is in 2026 now that every mobile phone is adding that to the Goople databases, but it was in the past.

> In July this year, the channel flagged that some LG monitors were automatically installing an app that collected device data and ran pop-up ads for LG’s other apps and even McAfee antivirus. The public pressure from that video prompted an intervention from Microsoft, and ultimately led to LG disabling the pop-up ads.

Can anyone explain why Windows even makes this possible? I had to fight against Windows installing Alienware command center nonsense automatically because I have a "gaming" Dell OLED. Windows automatically fetched and installed it just from plugging in the monitor, adding a new system tray icon and persistent daemon with these kinds of annoying pop-ups and probably a bunch of security vulnerabilities.

It's completely incomprehensible to me. The monitor works great without it, on both Windows and Linux! I left a negative review on an otherwise good monitor as a result, but Microsoft shouldn't even be entertaining this crap.

The intention is to allow for automatic installation of software that is actually needed for the function of the peripheral - think proprietary cameras or non-standard printers/IO/etc. It's not a bad goal, but it leads to manufacturers abusing it, unsurprisingly, for things that are not, in fact, necessary.

The question is specifically for monitors, for which this would have to be implemented separately because the discovery is different. At most a monitor should be associated with an automatic ICC profile.

> Can anyone explain why Windows even makes this possible?

Because, as much as we nerds might hate it, it's convenient to a large number of people. They plug in their device and the companion software to fully use all its features just installs itself. They don't have to go to some obscure URL and then locate their exact product. Even in the case you've described, the software likely enables some features of your monitor that aren't accessible otherwise. You don't care about them, but someone might.

But it should require asking the user if the installation is acceptable.

"But that would confuse users with a complicated interface"

- some product manager, who was thinking of additional ad revenue while trying to sound like not an asshole.

Have you asked "a large number of people" or are you projecting your fantasies?

this feature probably began life as "automatically download necessary drivers to make installation easier" and then after some massaging the definition of "necessary drivers" expanded to "anything the manufacturer would like to see running on this PC regardless of how necessary it is for the device to function".

Windows downloads the driver first, then the driver itself uses an AddSoftware directive to install a companion app. Which is ok when the app is a GPU control panel or similar, but here it was clearly abused.

When your job performance is tied to the number of new users you get onboard...

I largely don't use Windows anymore, but there is an option buried under Advanced System Settings/Properties under the hardware tab called Device Installation Settings. There you can turn this off (marked 'not recommended').

I know about this because I have a Windows 10 VM that was automatically installing an old broken Radeon driver through it that would just leave me with a black screen on boot. I also learned that if Microsoft got the scent of the driver and started downloading it turning this option off didn't stop that particular driver from continuing to download and hosing the install. Since I lacked a snapshot before this I had to reinstall the the entire OS in the VM with the GPU not passed through and then turn the option off first.

I hope I can soon get fable or the like to execute

"Please scan my computer for spyware, and if found, either remove it or find an exploit to permanently cripple the spying part of it"

All smart TVs should be disconnected from the internet. Use an AppleTV or similar.

All smart TVs should not come with WiFi or Ethernet controllers.

Then they are not smart TVs anymore. More precisely, they couldn't offer the features one expected from such. Think about a smartphone without internet connection.

Not sufficient, given reports of TVs and other devices automatically creating mesh networks. Your disconnected TV could talk to your neighbour's connected one. If anything, I wonder why LG isn't already doing it.

Edit: Getting pushback asking for evidence (fair). Most recently I read it in an HN thread a few years back. I thought it was a TCL TV, but I can't find it anymore. It wasn't Samsung's WiFi Direct, which I don't think was ever on by default.

Lacking better evidence, I'll admit I'm probably wrong and no TV has been documented doing this (yet).

Could you link to these reports, the ones with evidence?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659191/amazon-sidewalk-...

That is an article saying that mesh networking frameworks exist. It does not support the GP claim of smart TVs creating mesh networks across different owners.

If something is technically possible, one should act as though it is already happening and hope to be wrong rather than refusing to consider the issue until sufficient “proof” is given, by which it will be too late. Doubly so when advertisers are involved, who as a group are economically-incentivized to not care about consent.

This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but there is no evidence of some super-advertiser doing. It's not even clear to me that much of the 'fingerprinting' (past basic re-targeting) actually works.

> This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but [...]

Isn't this what people said pre-Snowden? Not that NSA spying is the same as corporate "surveillance capitalism", but if companies can make more money off it and the technology exists, it seems prudent to assume companies are trying it.

There was evidence of the NSA intercepting international communications before Snowden, but for some reason that didn't seem to make much of a lasting impression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

It's also significant to note that while the government is quite bad at keeping 'problematic' behavior secret, companies are much worse at it.

Analogously, there's evidence that companies will make extensive use of available techniques (browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) to track and surveil users without their knowledge and often against their will. The exposure of that arguably also hasn't triggered an effective backlash against those companies. So, as with the pre-Snowden evidence for domestic communication interception by the NSA, I think there's ample evidence of the willingness of companies to exploit whatever technologies they can in order to surveil users.

The way this is typically handled is through compartmentalization, where no one working has enough of a global view to be able to claim that the behaviour is problematic.

There's a lot that's problematic that we suspect that is going on but don't have firm proof, because the organization actually is pretty good at keeping it secret enough. There's some exceptions where things do get leaked/revealed, but how would you know if this was 99% of wrongdoing, or 0.99% of it?

This would be trivial to test and detect. Just like every claim that TVs will connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them to a network. Yet after years of these claims and being extremely trivial to test not a single shred of evidence has ever been provided.

How would you test this?

If they form a mesh and route traffic via one TV that acts as an exit node you can check the packet TTLs.

Isn't messing with TTLs a pretty obvious thing to do when communicating covertly? And wouldn't that kind of packet inspection only catch cases of TVs literally acting as packet-level routers, but not catch application-layer shenanigans like aggregating statistics in the exit node so that all the data going over your own network appears to be originating from the same device?

It's still implausible, but thoroughly verifying that your TV isn't spying on you isn't trivial.

There's no requirement that the mesh be IP-based or function as a layer-3 router...

Even if it were IP-bsaed, it would be extremely straightforward for one box to send a UDP message to another, and receive and retransmit at the application layer. No TTL nonsense, No multiple IPs showing up communicating upstream.

But if my TV is doing this, then by definition it's not acting as an exit node so how do I test it?

Put a WiFi NIC in monitor mode and see if the TV is connected to another AP based on the 802.11 packets.

Or if this theoretical implementation by a manufacturer is using a custom protocol/frequency (very unlikely for a variety of reasons), you'd begin by probing with an SDR.

Which part of that qualifies as trivial?

I only semi-agree with GP; it's trivial for someone who works in Tech to pull it off, but that's really all you need to blow the lid on the whole operation given manufacturers would likely have implemented the same behavior across all TVs of the same model/product segment.

How do you think? By broadcasting an open WiFi network and seeing if it connects and requests a DHCP Lease.

Here is maybe what he was remembering from HN:

> Our Samsung fridge’s manual says it’ll automatically and silently mesh network with any Samsung TVs in range, use AI and hidden cameras to recognize what’s in the fridge and when we use it, then have the TV inject targeted ads into programming based on its findings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742208

Wild. Still, paraphrased like that it triggers my "sure, that totally happened" detectors.

I’ve heard rumors of that, and also of TVs shipping with cellular modems with which to phone home. I don’t know if either have been confirmed, but it would be ridiculous for such a thing to be legal.

Cellular modems seem unlikely, because both they and the service plan they'd need are too expensive to be justified by any benefit to the manufacturer.

Yes. Considering 90%+ of users will just connect their TV to their WiFi, shipping a cell modem with every TV to catch that last 10% seems like bad ROI.

I could however see this happening in the future in response to regulation. For example some "think of the children" rule that makes TV makers responsible for blocking mature content.

Phones already have modems that do Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth in a single chip.

It may at some point no longer be economical to manufacture a Wi-Fi only modem.

Not so far fetched when your advertising revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars.

They just need this revenue by tv to be higher than the price of the mobile plan per tv. For a few Gb per month it may be relevant in the not so distant future.

Cell plans are very cheap when you are a company looking for low bandwidth off-peak service for a lot of devices. As individuals you can't get those deals, but companies can.

I don't know if TVs have a cell modem, but it isn't unreasonable to say they could.

As a different poster mentioned, the FCC needs to know about this though and so it will be documented.

I doubt the modem would cost more than $5 at scale. No idea what sort of off peak data deals you could get at scale but I have to imagine it’s close to being feasible.

You can get special IoT cellphone plans in bulk for something like $1 per device per month, or even less.

It's a longstanding, and obviously false, rumor. It would be trivial to prove that these things connect to open wifi networks to phone home, but no one has ever proved that they do that, because they don't actually do that. It would be a little harder, but still very easy, to prove that they connect to cell networks, but no one has proved that they do that either, because they don't actually do that either.

Keeping them disconnected from wifi is sufficient.

You're all over this thread posting this same thing but you admitted that to you, "trivial" means substantial reverse engineering.

"Trivial" to me means looking up the FCC ID of the device and seeing what kinds of RF emissions it is supposed to radiate.

Or, still trivial (but more expensive): Point a spectrum analyzer at it and see what kinds of RF emissions it actually radiates.

I don't need to open the box to understand what kinds of noises it makes.

Or even just realize that if the devices had this capability these companies couldn't resist using it to show you ads. Since these devices don't show up to date ads unless you manually connect them to a network you can be reasonably sure that they don't have a fallback internet connection.

It’s perfectly legal to put a cellular modem in a TV, but not without disclosing that to the FCC and on product labels. This and the mesh network thing for TVs are (currently) a conspiracy theory, which sucks because it muddies the waters in advance of it inevitably happening in reality.

In the good old USA everything is legal until Congress makes a law, and Congress shall make no law. In the EU it's illegal.

Which manufacturers and which TVs?

Otherwise it's just some 10+ year old rumour

Unless you have evidence, please stop spreading this rumor.

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

Please point me to the timestamp in that video that supports this claim:

> reports of TVs and other devices automatically creating mesh networks. Your disconnected TV could talk to your neighbour's connected one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49615448

Sorry but it's up to the vendors to prove that abuse is technologically impossible (through open source software and cryptography). Closed source software should always be assumed to do the worst thing possible.

I'm afraid I can't help you with your paranoia. TVs just simply don't do this. It would be trivial to prove if they did. There's plenty here to be upset about without making up stupid conspiracy theories.

Why do you defend LG?

I'm not.

We've established that your definition of "trivial" involves complete reverse engineering of the firmware...

See: Amazon Sidewalk

I have connected it to my network and then blocked it off the internet via Pi-hole. That way, I hope, it'll not try to scan for other open networks.

It’s still scanning (or at least listening to) all the other devices on your local network, like your phones, PCs, etc. It collects an inventory and if it ever happens to get Internet access, uploads that data.

That's why you put IoT crap into an isolated vlan with its own ssid, enforce device isolation for that ssid across all WAPs, and enforce isolation on the vlan level with your switches to cover any hardwired devices.

That's not really sufficient. It could still phone home if it falls back to IP addresses. You should be blocking it at the firewall level, not just with DNS.

But me personally, I wouldn't ever connect any of these devices to my network.

The only reason it is on my network is that I need it for home automation (via home bridge). I'll have to see what else I can do.

Firewall rule that prevents the tv from accessing the internet (by mac address if using dhcp, or set a static ip for the tv). Or stick it in separate quarantined IoT subnet with your devices.

Some of these devices also now use DoH to bypass any DNS-level filtering.

Some TVs will present a popover warning that they have not been able to check for updates for a while, after being disconnected for some time, and you can't close that without letting them connect (even if you are just using the screen to display content from an HDMI slot rather than using any of the other TV features).

Which ones? I'd be happy to know the brands.

Samsung TVs certainly do. A massive PITA.

Good to know. I don't buy Samsung anymore anyway. I have two CRG9s and they're already showing same problems after a couple of years. Had a midrange phone from them some years ago - started dying 6mo in (battery, restarts, slowness).

Be specific. Which models and after what time.

Mine has been running for two years now without insisting on updates.

FWIW, I've never seen that come up on the five or six TCLs that I've owned over the last decade. I have AppleTVs connected to all of them and never connect them to the internet. So far, so good.

I don't recall off the top of my head. It was covered in one of Louis Rossmann's rants so you might find information on the consumer rights wiki he talks about.

Do they still do it if they've never been connected to a network? So they don't even know what date/time it is relative to their current updates/firmware? Do they display the warning based on a cumulative power-on timer only (much as good quality computer displays have somewhere in their menus buried a figure showing their total cumulative power on hours).

I wonder if this is firmware related. I've had a Samsung TV for a few years now that I've never connected to the internet, so my firmware is likely very out of date, and it has never displayed a message like that.

A family has a soundbar that just turns off after a while if it isn't connected to the internet.

Sounds like an intentionally defective product. Just after warranty period ends, TV turns on but won't show my picture. Return it to the store if you live in a place with consumer protections. The warranty period is legally irrelevant in cases like this.

Just disable wifi. Occasionally factory reset, hook up to wifi for firmware update, then disable again.

Why do you need to update the firmware at all?

“or similar” like what?

Streaming sticks suffer from the exact same problem.

The Apple TV is the only device I know of in this space whose business model is not selling your data to the highest bidder.

Much better than an Apple TV is a Linux machine running Kodi.

Is it better or is it just more libre?

It's better. No content restrictions and more control.

So more libre. But is it also better?

Yeah, I think it's both.

Curious how a PS5 measures on the spyware scale

Part of the issue is many TV's these days are essentially bricked until you connect them to the internet to "activate".

Only if by "essentially bricked" you mean you can't use their "smart" functionality.

>All smart TVs should be disconnected from the internet.

Not good enough. The device has sufficient storage for YEARS of conversation data.

You connect it once to update the firmware and boom everything is backfilled. Your neighbor sets up an open SSID? It all gets out.

Is there some way to jailbreak your tv and run som open source os on it? Or something like that?

Not exactly sure what I’m after, but the problem is acute and widely prevalent, so there has to be some solution.

You can root most LG TVs but I'm not sure an alternative firmware exists or if it's even feasible.

https://cani.rootmy.tv/

Ahh that’s great - been waiting for something that works with my firmware for my LG TV (a C1). Any idea, once rooted, what commands I can run just to disable all the ads, bloatware and spyware?

No idea unfortunately. I had good success at blocking ads just via DNS (Pi-Hole or equivalent), but I have no idea if it does anything for the spyware.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/lg-tv-block-mini-how-to/2551...

My understanding is that this is difficult due to DRMd content refusing to work with Free operating systems.

Because yes, this nonsense would never fly in a world where Software Freedom enabled a competitive market for TV operating systems.

Probably just never give it internet access and plug in an HTPC with some form of Linux (I've heard KDE's Plasma Bigscreen is better than ever, though I haven't tried it myself)

This is the right solution. I would be tempted to go one step further: disassemble the TV and remove the WiFi card, antennas, and other unneeded hardware such as microphones or cameras. Same treatment as modern cars with cellular modems.

Sure, but that’s not a feasible solution for end-users, or people who hasn’t got all the free time

I wonder if there's MCX 50 ohm resistors...

I do this, but increasingly modern TVs complain about not being connected to the internet in general. Usually once every day or two I get a pop up on my Samsung 90F complaining that network access of required for some feature that seems to run on a timer.

https://archive.is/zmCOd

I need a Brother for TVs.

FYI, Brother has also started enshittifying their printers so don't skip the research the next time you buy.

Oh no! Thanks for the heads up!

To me this is where the EU MEPs should place their privacy concerns. Unless it ends up being another consent pop up on TVs.

I'll just throw this out here: https://www.webosbrew.org/rooting/

I believe I did have to connect it to the network to get it to some web page or other, but after that I had full control of it.

My LG TV is a bit older, though (2021 or so).

Does this mean that TVs can never be recycled or resold now, adding to the garbage problem? All you have to do is sell the TV to someone who does eventually connect it to the internet and it will upload all the data it acquired while the previous owner had it?

I've said it before, but I wish a somewhat trustworthy organization would create a 'DUMB' certification - "Don't Upload My Bits".

These weaponized TVs are a threat to both national and international security.

Hardware switches would be plus in modern era. Not just for mics.

As someone who has never owned a TV and doesn’t know about this space, are there any TV manufacturers that are just a basic screen anymore?

Not really (I've looked pretty thoroughly), but I've been looking into large format gaming monitors like the 48" Asus OLED PG48UQ [0] which are essentially dumb TV panels.

I haven't finished researching yet but happy to discover this category of monitor is a thing now, with close enough to the latest display tech at reasonable prices. I've never owned a TV either and I keep getting stuck trying to buy one because they are all so horrible.

These are essentially huge TV panels, with basic TV features like a remote control for the OSD. I guess because it's what gamers want... A TV scale monitor for use as a TV without all the smart TV bits which ruin games. There are also a bunch of "Smart Monitors" in this category to be ware, including from LG. The work is in distinguishing the true large format dumb monitors from the smart TVs in disguise.

[0] https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/asus-rog-swift-oled-p...

A lot of TVs can still be used as a dumb display if you simply ignore all their other useless "smart" functionality. If anything, "large format gaming monitors" are a response to that usage from the monitor industry wanting to get back some of those customers.

Yes, that used to be the way. But it's getting increasingly hard to ignore their smart functionality and be comfortable enough simply leaving it "unnetworked".

The problem is the incentives, even though TVs represent a higher turnover for LGE (roughly $1 B), they barely break even, whereas most of the 0.5 B from their advertising division (made through the TVs) is majority profit. They don't want you to use their TVs as monitors (they lose money that way), they are highly incentivised to find a way to track you. This is not unique to LG but they seem the worse affected while having the largest chunk of the market.

I feel a lot more comfortable with a monitor controller attached to the same OLED panel rather than trying to figure out if i've neutered LGs ad department enough, or worrying about it somehow independently gaining network in the future after monitoring everything in isolation as proven in this latest news. I think LG tvs doing something like automatic exfil via their own mesh network in future is not far fetched, it's practical with their market share and they have the incentives.

Like the sibling said, you have to look at large monitors or commercial displays. But both tend to cost a lot more for similar features (due to not having ad revenue attached, I assume) or have other compromises.

The best options seems to be finding a TV that is reported to be usable without any sign-in and without internet connection. The number of models that fall in that category is getting smaller over time.

Westinghouse makes a line of "non-smart" TVs. A few obscure Chinese brands do also.

But I was reliably informed this never happens! (Reasons I own an NEC commercial display instead)

By who? Manufacturers have been public about selling viewing data and put it in their user agreements.

Which NEC commercial display do you have? How do you like it for normal TV duties? What tradeoffs were you willing to make when you bought it compared to the features which were available in consumer-focused "smart" TVs?

MultiSync P495, with the additional daughter card for the RPI CM4.

As far as regular TV duties, the CM4 running libreELEC does everything I need and then some. The HDMI-CEC was flaky at one point, but from my research on it regular consumer TVs suffer from the same problem. If anything I'm more limited by the CM4's output, less the display itself.

Tradeoffs: I wanted to control my stack with minimal cabling pretty much everything else be damned, and this was a nice integrated solution and a excellent alternative to just buying a 43" dell monitor to hang on my wall. There are probably some image processing "features" that videophiles can comment on, but I've been used to literal decades of LCDs at this point, so an IPS display is going to be just fine(tm). Display lag is a bit higher than I would like for retro video games on it, but that's more an overall LCD problem, less a specific display issue.

In functionality it's much closer to a computer monitor than it is to a TV. The menus are obtuse, brutalist even, but if you ever had to work in IT and set up a conference room display you will feel right at home.

It's also a heavy pig compared to consumer televisions, right on the edge of what my mount is able to hold, and not really great to wrangle in a position by your lonesome, but not impossible either.

As for video: It's more than fine. Maybe the pixels are bigger than my macbook's screen, but at 6+ft viewing distance with my eyesight, I can't tell.

Are you confused between TVs selling your viewing habits using automated content recognition (which they all do and is well documented), vs TVs finding nefarious ways to still upload that data even after disabling network access? Because the latter is conspiracy theories and there's no evidence of it happening (and it would be trivial to verify if it was).

Except in the article that is literally parent of this discussion thread? Did you even RTFA?

It just says it stores it to upload later if/when its connected, not that it uses a 5G connection or connects to random open Wifi networks to upload it even if you never connected it to your own network. Did you read it?

Ah NEC. There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I used to have an NEC monitor.

They're usually sold as Sharp in the states, but the model numbers are the same, etc. As an old fogey of a nerd it's neat to have a NEC-branded remote/screen when I sit down to watch a movie.

What's the incentive for these manufacturers to do this?

Are they getting paid for the data (e.g. we'll pay you $100M to install spyware), or are they trying to be an ad platform, or is it simply analytics gone out of control?

They get to make money off of you for the rest of your life. They'll sell ads to companies, and they'll sell your data to anyone willing to pay enough for it.

Unfortunately, considering that 80-90% of people simply don't think or care about this, I can see the incentive.

I think that people just don't know about it. When directly confronted with it they react pretty strongly. Companies have done a very good job of hiding what they're doing from the public. They know people aren't going to read their 15,000 word EULA written in deceptively phrased legalese, and they wouldn't understand it if they read it anyway. Most Americans can't even read at a 6th grade level. People just have no idea what's being collected or what's being done with their data.

If really you want to see how people feel about being surveilled there's plenty of videos online showing people freaking out at someone just taking photos/video in public. A ton of people are absolutely convinced that the law protects them from being recorded in public. They're not going to imagine that a "respectable" corporation would be allowed to do it to them in their own homes.

Because they make higher margins on their ad business, details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

It showed VIZIO revenue numbers ($1B hardware sales at -0.8% profit margin, ~$500M ad revenue at 61% profit margin).

Based on that, it seems to me that TVs are a one-time-sale commodity with low margins, while ads are continual revenue generators with high margins. This makes the incentive extremely clear.

We shouldn't need to, but the wifi PCB module in LG OLED TVs is typically attached by a ribbon cable that can be easily disconnected.

The Magic Remote can also be replaced with dumb IR model without a microphone.

this basically vindicates everyone who has a streaming account _and_ feels like everything they say "suddenly pops up in an online ad the next day"

Yep, we were looking in the wrong place the whole time, it wasn't the phones.

Posted on a website where you can't read without subscribing... just like the video man! LG might be after money, but theverge is just the same lol.

Paywalls are how you run a business without ads/spyware. These are not remotely the same

Are the WiFi cards on these TV like laptops or soldered on. I wonder if you can atleast disconnect the antenna or remove WiFi chip.

Why? Just don't connect it to the internet.

(Yeah, yeah, when someone actually demos a TV seeking open WiFi APs, then we'll talk. And anyone bringing up ETH over HDMI gets a spankin'.)

XFinity has some bullshit where your router provides an AP for other XFinity members.

My understanding is that it uses bandwidth you aren't paying for to carry this signal rather than using up what you paid for, but still it's been there for something going on ten years.

That was the moment I bought my own cable modem instead of using theirs.

I was about to switch carriers anyway, that was the kick in the butt I needed to make the call and schedule an appointment.

Some parts of these organizations are aware that some of their rent comes from inertia. Other parts don't realize that they are providing the impulse to overcome that inertia.

So don't give it your Xfinity creds? My understanding is that Xfinity doesn't let just anyone connect to that network.

You lack imagination, which is a liability in this field.

Not your creds. Nothing stops the manufacturer from making a deal to get an account from XFinity and shipping the creds on the TV. Then they can exfiltrate data from anyone who has an Xfinity repeater anywhere in broadcast range.

Good time to extract the creds from the TV and get free internet.

Imagination is well and good but don't jump to assuming that just because you can imagine something it is already happening now. So far I have seen zero evidence that it is.

I didn’t say it’s happening. It’s a next step that has already been tried by others, though.

IIRC, BT does this in the UK (via the EE Wifi program).

There are reports, including in this thread, of TV models that require a login to proceed during initial setup

That's good that they let you know right out of the box that the TV needs to go back in the box, and back to the store. I mean, c'mon, OP is willing to desolder a board on their brand-new TV, boxing it back up and buying something else shouldn't be much of a barrier.

Not good enough. Eventually the grandparents will come to visit. They'll turn on the TV, it will ask them to "finish the setup procedure," they'll type in my wifi password and BOOM! I'm pwned.

That's on you for failing to set expectations for how others you let into your home treat your devices. I can't imagine anyone I know thinking to "finish setting up" something in my home without asking and there would be hell to pay if someone did.

Called it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43520903

This is the reason why I allow certain mac addresses to communicate outside of my house. SonicWall makes it easy.

These TVs will connect to any open wifi and upload your data - your firewall only works for your network.

> SonicWall makes it easy.

This might be the first time I've ever seen anyone say something even slightly positive about SonicWall.

Reminder that smart TV ids are part of California's DROP platform, and that you can (and should) request that all registered data brokers delete data associated with your television.

I'm confused, the article claims the TVs are uploading data when offline? That's is literally impossible. Are they using a different definition of offline from normal people?

The original article from Gamers Nexus says they upload saved audio when an internet connection is restored.

More reason to stick with my monitor and Kodi.

Just unplugged mine and set up a fire stick

I'm in the market for a good TV to pair with my PS5 Pro for GTA6.

What brand does not do scummy things like this, or that I can easily avoid by not requiring me to download an app to set up?

1787648954 | Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ads-and-tracking-inf... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430960 | 1 comment

1787769410 | Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ads-and-tracking-inf... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49453736 | 1 comment

1787857147 | Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ads-and-tracking-inf... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469603 | 1 comment

1787915616 | Just let my TV be a TV | https://twitter.com/LaNativePatriot/status/20931631746736992... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476983 | 0 comments

1787948877 | Stopping the smart TV from being used against you | https://www.s-config.com/stopping-a-smart-tv-from-being-used... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483816 | 165 comments

1788545733 | Why Smart TVs Track What You Watch | http://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/research/smart-tv-data-privac... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568172 | 0 comments

1788587154 | LG and Samsung TVs are logging everything you say [video] | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5KnFmKjFTA | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49573427 | 4 comments

1788604574 | LG TVs aren't the only ones spying on you [video] | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvFu343KNek | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49575176 | 18 comments

1788740524 | 216M Spy TVs The LG Smart TV Problem [video] | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375 | 980 comments

1788764600 | LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices | http://www.notebookcheck.net/LG-smart-TVs-caught-logging-aud... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594878 | 3 comments

1788781693 | ACR Spying and Security Vulnerabilities with LG Smart TVs [video] | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49597203 | 0 comments

1788790304 | 216M Spy TVs The LG Smart TV Problem (Gamers Nexus) | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49598691 | 0 comments

1788819307 | Can I Root My TV? | http://cani.rootmy.tv/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49603567 | 1 comment

1788829248 | Disconnect your LG television from the internet, now | http://appleinsider.com/articles/26/09/07/disconnect-your-lg... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49604537 | 2 comments

1788837644 | A Screensaver for LG's Spying Smart TVs | http://weowntheglass.com | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605356 | 13 comments

1788838824 | GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea | http://leaflet.pub/p/did:plc:yhgc5rlqhoezrx6fbawajxlh/3muwrq... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605424 | 122 comments

Comment counts taken at around 2026-09-08 17:42:18 +0000

I doubt they are doing this in the EU. One GDPR request and they would be in a lot of trouble.

Ohh my this website is terrible on mobile

The fact they they can connect to Xfinity networks without consent is shocking too. For all those “just don’t connect the cable” responses, it still connects! And what happens when they go GSM?

Sure you can try to open up the box and yank the WiFi antenna… until it is so deeply integrated into the board that you cannot.

This isn’t just an “oh well” situation. This needs a law.

This needs people to open their TVs, determine the modifications needed to neuter the spy functionality, and publish the procedure.

as the parent poster said, that works until they bury it so hard that you can't find it, or that it can't be removed without impacting service.

all LG needs to do is put the connection inline to something important like responding to your remote control or changing channels. rip it out and it won't work anymore. LG then curses you for voiding the warranty and tells you go to go hell when you complain.

it needs a law.

The article says that? I searched for Xfinity and nothing came up.

Watch the original video posted yesterday.

I went and checked out the section of the video where he talks about XFinityWifi networks [1]. Literally nothing was tested, he just said “there are reports of devices (not TVs, just “devices”) connecting to XFinityWifi open networks… so even just not letting TVs connect to your WiFI won’t keep you safe!” That’s it!? Why not actually test it!?

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&ra=m

> The fact they they can connect to Xfinity networks without consent is shocking too. For all those “just don’t connect the cable” responses, it still connects!

No, it doesn't.

I was wondering where this claim even came from.

It's from a comment, not even the article or the video it's based on. It's just the same internet rumor mill that's been going around for years, but more official because someone quotes it on an discussion on a news article because someone posted it in the comments of the article.

Anyone who's tried to test this theory has not proved it. A few claims in support forums are more likely to be people's guests or family just connecting it to the wifi.

It is LITERALLY in the video.

Where in the video do they say "We tested the TV and found it connected to an open wifi network" or anything to that effect?

What they say "Some ISPs provide open networks and some [unspecified] smart devices automatically connect to such networks". They don't say these TVs (or any TVs) are in that bucket. Given how much they've tested about these TVs, I'd say they'd have found and named any TVs that did that.

Honestly this was more a behaviour of very early wifi devices, I don't think I've run into such a device in decades, since people started talking about open wifi networks like they talk about piles of needles.

Honestly there's enough real misbehaviour documented in the video to go without making some up, and it's a little disappointing GN decide to allude to that claim without proof.

Just logged onto the router in a building where I do the wifi and there is a Fn-Link device which appears to be associated with a LGwebOSTV which a new occupant apparently brought in recently.

Looks like the TV has two wifi devices, could be a bit like "belt and suspenders".

Fn-Link seems to be known not just for their WiFi interfaces, but WiFi-IOT "modules" having quite capable processors also, which they seem to be fairly accomplished at. Interestingly, AI screeds that Fn-Link is heavily associated with "mesh."

The router usually does a pretty good job of identifying what kind of device, from phones, PCs, tablets, Macs, switches, extenders, etc. The TV is identified by name as above and automatically showed the proper TV icon, and it would have to have been given the proper user wifi password when set up or it wouldn't be on the router to begin with. Main TV wifi is directly on the router's 5G frequencies.

The Fn-Link named device is always using the preceding IP address by DHCP, but it is logged into a separate 2G extender also within range which does use the same password. The main router autoassigns to the Fn-Link the kind of icon you get from an extender or wifi access point itself.

I'm getting the idea that the Fn-Link PCB gets the wifi password from the TV setup routine then takes action on it's own from there. Will be changing the password on the extender and see if the Fn-Link moves to the main 5G channel.

More alarming was the way my buddy's MacBook Pro had apparently logged into the Fn-Link device and was sharing the same local IP address, could very well have been MITM'd until I blocked the Fn-Link device and the MacBook went directly back on the main 5G router. Re-allowing the Fn-Link device has not seemed to be involved with the MacBook after that.

Take a look at the "Fn-Link Product Manual.pdf" on this page for a general line card:

https://www.fn-link.com/download-p2.html

And something like the "AIot module" here:

https://www.fn-link.com/V200Z-R-AIoT-Module-pd41426492.html

To get the minimal rundown on explicit capabilities.

Of course they also appear to be very advanced when it comes to the less-common PLC-IOT modules which are used for industrial control, so it's not like they're completely driven by the relatively huge consumer market, more like the mission to collect data and execute control where it hasn't already been addressed, wherever it may turn up.

Naturally Fn_Link also makes modules that support GSM and CDMA also

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375

Several discussions this week, some merged, these not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605424

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605356

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49573427

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49575176

a number of those are Related yes, and/or the original submission that didn't get much discussion, so second submission was it. And this one is a dupe, referencing the source. Same discussion.

> (Normally we'd merge this one thither...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49616414

I don't mean to be dismissive, but isn't this old news? Hasn't it been the case that _all_ "smart" TVs have been spying on users since they came out? I've personally operated as if they are: my TV is not connected to the internet. At least, not through my internet connection. It's not on my wifi, nor is it connected to my LAN.

This is straight up dystopian level spying. Streaming microphone inputs all the time, knowing everything that is displayed on the screens via object recognition and stuff. Scraping your local network. If I’m not mistaken there is the possibility for the tv to connect to public/open networks to send this stuff without you knowing. Magically syncing with your phone. It’s truly terrible, and a class action is all but guaranteed to come. Gamers nexus has a great video on this.

This is a known feature that is not hidden which is not automatically turned on by default.

You must set your TV to a different standby mode and enable LG voice control.

When you do this, it very plainly tells you that it can listen with the screen off so you can control the TV with voice.

Failure of User Awareness, not some nefarious spyware.

No, you're not up to date with the latest news. There's a separate feature that records you all the time, transcribes it to text and uses it to select ads for you

Do you have a source for this claim?

The gamer's nexus investigation

That is exactly what I am claiming is false. Later LG even came out with their own statement saying basically the same thing I did.

What is this separate feature you claim that is not the same as the one I refer to?

> If I’m not mistaken there is the possibility for the tv to connect to public/open networks to send this stuff without you knowing.

No, there is no evidence that any TV has ever done this. Please stop spreading this rumor.

We knew they were reporting back our watching habits of the built-in stuff. Then we learned they were doing video capture on HDMI ports to report back on what we watched on external sources (Xbox, Apple TV, etc). Then we learned that they did botnet-like stuff in the background even when they were switched off.

NOW we're learning that they're spying with their internal microphone when switched off.

A real problem is that you might not even need to give these internet access. If your neighbor gives their TV internet access and it can establish a mesh connection then it might be able to exfiltrate data that way. I don't know of any TVs that do this, but it's always been a possibility.

Another possibility is even if you don't give it access to your wifi, if you eventually give your TV away or sell it, the new user could connect it to wifi and if it has any persistent storage then it could upload all of its stored data about you at that point.

Companies that do this need to end their entire brand, because they're just helping the CCP.

> A real problem is that you might not even need to give these internet access. If your neighbor gives their TV internet access and it can establish a mesh connection then it might be able to exfiltrate data that way.

No TV has ever been shown to do this. Please stop spreading this rumor.

I didn't say a TV had been, if you read. I will absolutely not stop spreading the possibility, because it is in fact a possibility. This is more true now than it has ever been, because even if a manufacturer doesn't do this we're now in a world where AI could potentially exploit devices and make hops like this. The risk is higher in areas with higher population density though, like multi-story apartments.

We know that device connection sharing is a thing that has occurred and it's not unreasonable to see the risk of it coming to TVs.

Why, do you work for a TV company?

Partly it annoys me because the answer to the question "how do I protect myself?" is simply "don't connect it to wifi" and that's it. These rumors make it all complicated to answer when it's really not that deep. This isn't deep NSA spy craft, it's shitty software uploading logs and half-assed data collection to the Internet. That's it.

But if I'm honest, it's mostly because I'm disappointed that they don't do this. It'd be a fascinating story. Imagine the braindead balls it'd take to make a feature that insanely abusive, and how good the outrage out it would be to read. That'd be a killer story for someone to break, it'd be like the xz backdoor or the Snowden NSA leaks. Instead we get these dumb "Mew under a truck"-quality grade school rumors in comments sections and it's just so stupid and disappointing.

(And honestly-honestly a tiny part of it is trying to goad one of these commenters into actually doing the work to find someone who really is doing this, so I can read that story.)

The story is both a little overblown and a little underblown, just different parts of it. More people need to be thinking about the feature level of devices and understand that "off" doesn't really mean it most of the time. Does the TV need a camera? Does it really need a microphone? Does it need to be smart at all? The matter of whether it is abused is increasingly less important than whether it can be abused. There have been all kinds of clever abuses we've been lucky not to see over the past 3 decades, but I'm afraid that relative quiet may be over.

I still don't understand why there wasn't an absolute outrage about internet providers putting their own routers inside your network and blocking other routers by default unless you call them. Suddenly all these providers have managed hardware inside your network and if they wanted to, they could scoop up all of the LAN traffic.

On top of that, some of them even portion out wireless to people outside your network from the router you're paying for while increasing attack surface.

The big tech companies, the providers, the government and foreign adversaries are winning bigtime. It does feel like there's a little bit of hope that people are wising up about AI exploding privacy and security risks, so more people are thinking about the dumbest things which have become the norms.

The guy can't read, he only knows how to keep saying "there's no evidence TVs do this" over and over, even when you already said there wasn't evidence yet.

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