LG TVs Are Spying On You. Kill The Setting.

LG Electronics spent most of September on the back foot after a lengthy independent investigation accused its webOS smart TVs, including current OLED models, of quietly harvesting far more viewing and household data than most owners realise. The hardware testing outlet Gamers Nexus published a 135-minute breakdown on September 7, 2026 alleging that retail webOS televisions were doing more than the standard smart-TV analytics LG has long described, a claim that spread fast across tech forums and prompted security researchers to take a second look at what these sets are actually doing when nobody is watching. LG's response came in stages. Within two days the company was publicly rejecting the most alarming claims, and by September 12 it had published a formal statement from its Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey headquarters titled 'Understanding Privacy On LG Smart TVs,' arguing that recent coverage had fed misconceptions about how its sets actually work. LG has repeatedly said its automatic content recognition system, voice recognition and interest-based advertising are optional features that stay switched off until an owner actively opts in, and that the ability of a TV to scan for and connect to other devices on the same home network is a standard smart-home function rather than covert surveillance. The company has specifically denied that its TVs continuously record ambient conversations. That pushback did not settle the matter, because a separate and more technical problem surfaced almost simultaneously. Security researchers at Malwarebytes reported flaws in LG televisions that could theoretically let an attacker listen in even while a set sits in standby mode, and the firm's advice to owners was blunt: go into the privacy menus and turn off content recognition, viewing-information collection, personalised advertising and voice recognition, whether or not a household trusts LG's own account of what the features do. A flaw that lets a third party abuse a microphone is a different animal from a manufacturer collecting analytics, but both point to the same fix, which is stripping back every permission a television has been quietly granted since it left the box. None of this is really new territory for LG. In May 2026, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a settlement with the company following a state investigation into what his office had accused LG, alongside rivals Hisense and TCL, of doing to residents' living rooms. The lawsuit had alleged the companies were spying on Texans by secretly recording what consumers watch in their own homes. LG resolved its piece of the dispute through an Agreed Final Judgment and Permanent Injunction, and as part of the deal the company agreed to give users clearer pop-up disclosures and genuine opt-out options rather than settings buried three or four menus deep. The technology at the centre of all of it is called automatic content recognition, or ACR, and LG markets its version under the name Live Plus, built using fingerprinting technology from the ad-tech firm Alphonso. It works by taking a constant read of what is on screen and matching it against a reference database so LG and its advertising partners know exactly what a household is watching, live TV, streaming apps, even a game console plugged into the HDMI port, and can sell that audience data onward. LG's own global privacy policy is blunt about the endgame, stating that it shares personal information including how a customer interacts with its services and the ads they see with social networks and other advertising partners to measure and improve marketing. Turning it off does not require throwing the television out or living without smart features. It takes a five-stop tour through menus most owners have never opened. On a current webOS set, the path is Settings, then All Settings, then Support, then Privacy and Terms.

• Open User Agreements and untick the Viewing Information Agreement, which is the consent LG uses for ACR and the Live Plus branding.
• In the same User Agreements screen, opt out of the Voice Information Agreement so nothing tied to the remote's microphone gets logged.
• Go to the Advertising section and toggle on Limit Ad Tracking, then select Reset Advertising ID to wipe the profile already built against the television.
• Look for a Do Not Sell My Personal Information toggle under the same Privacy and Terms menu and switch it on.
• Back out to General, then System, then Additional Settings, and switch Live Plus off directly if it still appears as a separate toggle on the model in question, since menu labels shift between webOS versions.

For anyone buying a secondhand LG television, or anyone who simply wants a clean slate rather than clicking through five separate toggles, a full factory reset wipes every agreement back to default and forces a fresh setup wizard, at which point declining every data-sharing prompt achieves the same result in one pass rather than five.