Every major TV maker tracks your viewing, not just LG, The Verge reports

A more than two-hour video from the hardware channel Gamers Nexus, alleging that LG televisions record their owners and leak network details, has ignited a backlash among buyers. Reporting from The Verge now argues the controversy is bigger than one brand: every major television manufacturer tracks what people watch and shares that information with partners, with consent obtained through agreements most users never fully read.

Subsidized hardware, monetized viewers

According to The Verge, the practice is structural rather than incidental. Television prices have fallen so far that some companies sell sets at a loss and recover the difference by monetizing behavioral data gathered through the operating system. The Verge cites Walmart's 2024 purchase of Vizio as an illustration of how valuable that viewership data has become to retailers and advertisers.

How automatic content recognition works

The main tool is automatic content recognition, or ACR, which The Verge says is built into nearly every modern TV. The system captures brief samples of audio or video from whatever is playing, whether through built-in streaming apps or devices attached to the TV's ports, converts them into digital fingerprints, and matches them against a database. That powers content recommendations and targeted advertising, and supplies measurement firms such as Nielsen with cross-platform viewership data.

Consent is nominally required, but Gamers Nexus complained that the agreements are long, confusing, and presented with misleading interface design. The Verge describes one example from the video: an LG set displaying six agreements during setup, with the cursor pre-placed on a "Select All" option even though only two of the documents were necessary to proceed.

The more serious allegations against LG

Beyond ACR, Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs exploited security vulnerabilities to take control of an LG TV, and reported that it recorded video and audio while appearing to be off, transmitted information about the local network to LG's servers, and kept its microphone running for 10 to 15 seconds after a voice search ended. The Verge adds that the testers enabled an optional wake word and raised the far-field microphone's sensitivity, extending how far away it could pick up speech.

The Verge offers an important caveat on the most alarming claim: recording while apparently off seems to have been possible only after the researchers rooted the TV using an exploit that itself requires network access. A TV that can be rooted with nothing more than a network connection would be a genuine security flaw, but an attacker would still need to reach the private network first.

The Verge also pushes back on speculation within the video, noting that Gamers Nexus suggested a disconnected TV might auto-join open neighborhood Wi-Fi hotspots to keep uploading data, without presenting evidence that LG sets actually attempt this. Such unsupported claims, The Verge argues, undermine the legitimate vulnerabilities the testing uncovered.

Practical steps for owners

For viewers who want to reduce exposure, The Verge recommends signing in with a dedicated email account unconnected to personal ones, accepting only the agreements required for the TV to function, and declining ACR, which vendors sell under names such as Enhanced Viewing, Smart TV Experience and Samba Interactive TV. Every menu should then be checked manually, since advertising and tracking toggles are scattered and often worded confusingly.

Voice control is best avoided, or used through a separate streaming box from a trusted brand. The most thorough option is disconnecting the TV from the network entirely and treating it as a dumb display paired with an external streaming device; The Verge notes Apple's box does not use ACR, though individual streaming services still track activity tied to each login. Consumer Reports maintains a per-manufacturer guide to limiting data collection, The Verge adds.

Why it matters

The Gamers Nexus video may overreach in places, but the picture The Verge confirms is that smart TVs are networked computers whose low prices are partly funded by telemetry, and whose consent flows are engineered to maximize agreement. For anyone running a home network, that argues for treating a television as an untrusted endpoint: segmenting it, disabling recognition features, or bypassing its operating system with an external streaming device. The security dimension matters as much as the privacy one, because if a set can be rooted with only network access, a compromised TV is not merely a data leak but a microphone and screen inside the home, controlled by whoever holds that access.