LG Smart TVs Caught Recording Audio With the Screen Off, Here Is Every Setting to Turn Off

A friend sent me a Hacker News thread this week with a title that just says LG smart TVs caught logging audio with the screen off, sitting at 416 points with a few hundred comments. I assumed it was the usual smart-TV-paranoia post until I clicked in and saw it was Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs, two well-known independent hardware testing outfits, actually packet-capturing the traffic themselves.

What they actually found

Using Wireshark to capture the traffic, they found the TV picking up clean microphone audio while the screen looked fully off and the set was sitting in standby. The part that got everyone's attention was the offline test, they pulled the Ethernet cable, and the TV kept recording voice input and saving it locally, then uploaded the whole batch the moment the network came back. Standby wasn't idle in other ways either, the set was actively scanning the local network for unrelated devices, phones and smartwatches included, while also picking up nearby Wi-Fi network names, signal strength, and location data. The model actually tested was LG's flagship OLED G5, there's no published result yet for other models, and LG had not issued a public response as of when I checked.

It's worth separating this from ACR, the thing most people already associate with smart TV tracking, since they're not the same problem. ACR is the fingerprinting side, it samples whatever's on screen, turns it into a signature, and matches it against a database so the manufacturer knows what you watched, then sells that into an ad profile, most brands quietly admit to this somewhere in the terms you clicked through without reading. What Gamers Nexus found is underneath that, whether the mic is actually off when the screen says it is, and whether the TV is mapping every other device on your network without asking. Stack those two together and you get why this thread took off the way it did.

Every LG setting involved, there are four of them

If you already own an LG TV, there are four separate settings groups here, and skipping one defeats the point of doing the rest. ACR and personalized recommendations live under something called Live Plus, go to Settings, General, System, Additional Settings, and turn Live Plus off. Ad tracking is tracked separately, under Settings, General, Advertisements, turn on Do Not Sell My Personal Information or Limit Ad Tracking. Standby wake behavior is called Always Ready, under Settings, General, turn it off, and this also kills the voice assistant's ability to stay on standby while the screen is off. Voice recognition itself has a fourth switch, Settings, General, AI Service, Voice Recognition Settings, turn off Hands-free Voice Control. That only kills the always-listening wake-word mode, the push-to-talk mic button on the remote still works fine afterward, you just have to hold it down to search instead of the TV listening for a wake word all the time. Last, check app-level permissions under Settings, Support, Privacy & Terms, App Permissions, which lists camera and microphone access separately for every installed app, and turn off anything that doesn't need it.

Samsung's version

Gamers Nexus only tested LG here, Samsung wasn't part of this investigation and hasn't been caught doing the same standby recording. Samsung's ACR feature is still worth turning off on general principle though, it's called Viewing Information Services, works the same way LG's Live Plus does, fingerprinting what's on screen to build an ad profile. Go to Settings, All Settings, General & Privacy, then Terms & Privacy or Privacy Choices depending on your model, and turn Viewing Information Services off.

Once all of this is off, the personalized recommendations row on the home screen disappears, since the system no longer knows what you actually watch. That's the tradeoff, not a sign something's broken.

What actually stops it

My own takeaway after going through all this is that re-checking four or five toggles every time the TV pushes a firmware update isn't a great long-term plan, and the cleanest fix is treating the TV as a dumb display and running everything through a streaming device you control instead, which is roughly what Gamers Nexus recommended too. But there's a catch worth being honest about, the report that found the offline standby recording also found it keeps recording locally and just uploads later once the network comes back, which means plugging in an external streaming box while the TV itself stays connected to your home Wi-Fi doesn't actually close the gap. For this to work, the TV needs to come off your network entirely, HDMI only, video coming from the external box, with the TV's own Wi-Fi radio never touching your network again. A streaming stick solves the software side, it doesn't solve anything if the TV underneath it is still phoning home. The tradeoff is real too, an offline TV stops getting firmware and security updates, and anything that relies on the TV's own network stack, built-in AirPlay or casting straight to the TV instead of through your streaming box, stops working. You're trading that convenience for the mic and the network scanning actually going quiet.

Where I've landed on this for my own TV is running everything through the external box and leaving the TV off my Wi-Fi entirely. Manual updates aren't hard, LG's support site lets you download the firmware file for your exact model, drop it on a USB drive in a folder named LG_DTV, plug it into the TV, and it prompts you to install, no network needed. I'd rather do that every few months than leave the mic connected to the internet full time. That's just what's working for me so far, not a universal answer, and I'll update this if the next firmware round changes anything.