Imagine hiring a house cleaner who swears they never read your mail, then admitting they do walk through every room writing down what furniture you own. Both statements can be true at once. Neither one is comforting.
That is roughly where LG has landed. After Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers published findings about LG smart TVs logging and uploading user data, LG issued a statement to Tom’s Hardware on 9 September 2026 denying the most alarming parts. No constant conversation recording. No audio capture during standby. Voice data collection, the company says, is opt-in and has to be switched on by the user. What LG did confirm is that its TVs scan the local network.
The original investigation claimed 216,000,000 TVs were involved in spying and audio recording. LG called the claims “not true.” Hacker News racked up 359 comments on the spying thread and another 133 on a separate discussion about why rooting your TV is a bad idea. So the internet has opinions.
The Denial Is Narrower Than It Sounds
I review AI tools for a living, which mostly means reading privacy policies written by people who hope you will not. The pattern is always the same: a company denies the most cinematic accusation, confirms the boring one, and lets you assume the boring one is fine.
Network scanning is the boring one. It is also the part LG admitted to without much fuss. A device that enumerates everything on your home network knows how many phones live in your house, what brand of printer you bought, whether you own a smart lock, when devices join and leave. That is not audio. It is arguably more useful than audio, because it is structured, it is small, and it does not require anyone to transcribe anything.
“We do not record your conversations” and “we do not build a picture of your household” are two very different promises. LG made the first one. The second one is not in the statement.
Opt-In Is Doing A Lot Of Work Here
LG’s position is that voice data collection requires activation. Fine. Technically accurate consent claims are the most abused category of statement in consumer tech, because the word “opt-in” covers everything from a clearly labeled toggle you sought out yourself to a setup wizard screen where “Accept” is the big button and “Learn More” is grey text at the bottom.
I have no evidence about which one LG uses, and I am not going to invent any. But if you set up a TV in the last five years and cannot remember what you agreed to, that is data worth having about how meaningful the consent was.
Why This Matters For AI Tools Specifically
This is the same fight playing out across every AI product I test, just with a bigger screen attached.
- The scary accusation gets denied loudly, because denying it is easy and it makes a good headline.
- The mundane data collection gets confirmed quietly, because it is legal, disclosed somewhere, and nobody writes a thread about it.
- The gap between those two things is where the actual product lives.
Voice assistants, agent frameworks, browser extensions, smart appliances: all of them run this play. The useful question is never “is it recording me.” It is “what does it collect by default, where does it go, and can I turn it off without breaking the thing I paid for.”
What I Would Actually Do
Practical stuff, not paranoia. Put the TV on a separate network or guest VLAN if your router supports it, which limits what a network scan can even see. Go through the privacy settings menu and read them once, properly, including the ones buried under “personalized advertising.” If your TV never needs an internet connection for how you use it, do not give it one.
And skip rooting it. The Hacker News crowd already covered why that path leads to a bricked panel and no warranty. Solid research from independent labs is more useful than you soldering something at midnight.
The Honest Read
LG’s denial may well be accurate on the specific charges. I have not seen evidence that contradicts it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise for engagement. What I will say is that the company confirmed the thing it was comfortable confirming, and network scanning on hundreds of millions of devices is not a footnote. It is a feature with consequences that nobody in the marketing department is going to explain to you.
Treat this as a reminder that the devices in your house are also clients on your network, and they behave like it. The denial addressed the microphone. The network is still the story.
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