Remember when buying a television meant walking into a store, paying hard-earned cash for a giant glass box, plugging it into the wall, and watching things? Simpler times, right? Now, dragging a new telly into your house is basically inviting a hyper-funded, data-harvesting CIA operative into your living room—except this one makes you sit through unskippable firmware updates and tries to sell you laundry detergent.
The latest offender in our ongoing descent into corporate dystopia? LG.
Shocking absolutely nobody who pays attention, LG smart TVs have been caught logging audio even when the screen is supposedly powered down, alongside heavy-handed snooping on every other device connected to your local network. Oh, you thought your home network was your castle? Cute. Your LG panel has been treating your Wi-Fi router like an open-access buffet, scanning for dev machines, IoT gadgets, and whatever else you’ve got hooked up.
Let’s talk about the audio logging first, because it’s the kind of feature that makes you want to throw your remote through the drywall. When the screen is off, you assume the device is dead. It’s resting. It’s pining for the fjords. But no—under the hood, parts of the system are still wide awake, quietly chewing up ambient sound and feeding telemetry back to the mothership.
Why? Because apparently, giant conglomerates can’t sleep at night unless they know whether you talk to your cat in a high-pitched baby voice or curse at the news. They call it “enhancing user experience” or “voice-activation readiness.” I call it wiretapping without a warrant.
And then there’s the local network snooping. This is where every self-respecting developer and tech-adjacent human should lose their minds. A TV has one job: render pixels on a screen from an HDMI source or a streaming app. It does not need to ARP-scan your subnet. It has no business auditing the Raspberry Pi running your Pi-hole, sniffing out your NAS, or cataloging the smart bulbs in your ceiling. When a piece of hardware starts mapping out the perimeter of your digital home like an occupying army, it’s time to start asking some very uncomfortable questions about who actually owns the gear sitting on your TV stand.
Here’s the bitter pill we all need to swallow: we did this to ourselves. We let consumer tech race to the bottom on price, subsidizing hardware costs with targeted ads and perpetual surveillance. We traded privacy for convenience, buying “smart” displays that are essentially Trojan horses with 4K resolution. Manufacturers figured out that a TV isn’t a hardware product anymore; it’s a permanent billboard and data-mining rig that you were foolish enough to pay full retail price for.
If you’re a dev, you’ve probably locked down your VLANs, set up firewall rules, and maybe even blocked your TV’s internet access entirely via a Pi-hole or router sinkhole. Good. Keep doing that. Treat your smart TV like a feral raccoon: feed it nothing, trust it less, and keep it away from anything important. But for the average consumer? They’ll read about this scandal, shrug, click “I Agree” on the next forced terms-of-service update, and go right back to watching reality TV while a microphone listens to their breathing.
We’ve built a world where appliances are actively hostile witnesses against us in the court of consumer capitalism. Stop buying smart TVs, or at least stop connecting them to the internet.
Hot Take: If your television needs a software update, a privacy policy longer than War and Peace, and an internet connection just to show a picture, it’s not an appliance—it’s an overpriced wiretap that you willingly financed.