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It turns out your television might be doing a lot more than sitting quietly in the corner with its screen blank.
Over 200 million LG smart TVs are actively listening to you, Gamers Nexus has found in a detailed investigation. It appears your TV is mapping out every device on your Wi-Fi — such as phones and smartwatches — and listening in while you think it's in standby mode.
Once it reconnects to the internet, everything it gathered gets sent off to LG's servers.
The vigilant team at Gamers Nexus used a network monitoring tool called Wireshark to test this, which is essentially software that lets you see every bit of data flowing in and out of a device. They ran tests on retail LG OLED sets and their G5 model to discover these findings.
The packet captures showed the TVs were actively hunting for other gadgets on the home network — things like phones and smartwatches that have nothing to do with watching telly. On top of that, the sets were taking names and signal strengths of nearby Wi-Fi networks, along with location data.
Arguably most unsettling, the bench testing showed the TV could pick up clear microphone audio while the screen appeared to be off in standby. When the researchers pulled the Ethernet cable, the set kept saving voice recordings locally — then uploaded everything the moment it was plugged back in.
However, LG smart TVs are not the only ones to be gathering this kind of data in the background.
The TVs, such as an LG, use something called Automated Content Recognition, or ACR. This is similar to Shazam but for your screen — it takes samples of whatever audio and video are playing and turns them into digital fingerprints. Those fingerprints let the system log exactly what you're watching, regardless of whether you're using a streaming app, a game console, or a Blu-ray player. Every input gets tracked.
ACR technology is baked into virtually every major smart TV brand on the market, and it's almost always switched on by default when you first set up a new set.
Unlike a streaming app that knows what you picked because you chose it from a menu, ACR operates independently. It's designed to analyse the audio and video signal passing through your television and match it against a database of known content. That means it can identify what you're watching even if you're playing a DVD or a Blu-ray disc with no internet connection involved at all.
Once the TV knows what's on screen, that viewing data becomes a product. Manufacturers can package it up and sell it to advertisers and other companies eager to understand exactly what millions of households are watching and when.
For instance, all of the collected information found from Gamers Nexus feeds directly into LG Ad Solutions, the company's own targeted advertising arm.
To put the scale of this into perspective, LG says it has sold around 216 million smart TVs worldwide. And the ad division claims access to 363 million secondary addressable devices in the United States alone, by tracking other hardware sitting on the same home network as an LG telly.
The good news is you can turn ACR off, though every brand buries it under a different name.
Here's a guide to turning these settings off, depending on your TV brand:
