LG pushes back on claims its smart TVs record and upload user audio

LG disputes the reports

LG has publicly denied that its smart TVs spy on their owners, issuing a statement that pushes back on recent claims that the sets capture and upload audio from users' homes. According to The Verge, the company argued that "some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work."

The statement responds to findings published earlier this week by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers, who detailed what they described as evidence that LG televisions log user activity and send data to remote servers.

What LG claims

As reported by The Verge, the company's defense rests on two main points. The first is that its "TVs do not continuously record or transmit users' conversations," and that wake-word detection — the mechanism that lets a set respond to a voice command — is processed on the device rather than in the cloud.

The second is that data-driven features including Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional and, in LG's words, "not enabled by default."

LG also offered a technical explanation of ACR. According to the company, the feature relies on audio fingerprinting performed by the TV's internal audio processor rather than a speaker, and it does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the television.

The qualifier at the center of the dispute

According to The Verge, the word "continuously" in LG's denial is doing a lot of work. Gamers Nexus demonstrated an LG TV maintaining extensive logs of ambient conversations long after the point at which an owner would reasonably assume the built-in AI assistant had stopped listening.

That distinction matters. A denial scoped narrowly to continuous recording leaves room for other behavior: a set could capture audio in bursts, or keep logs of what it hears, without recording in the unbroken, always-on sense the statement rejects. Whether LG's characterization and the researchers' findings can both be accurate hinges on details the statement does not spell out.

Questions left unanswered

The Verge notes that LG's statement did not engage with several of the broader concerns raised by the research: how much data the televisions collect overall, which third parties that data is shared with, whether the features could be exploited by bad actors, and criticism that the TVs' privacy options are presented in a misleading way.

Why it matters

Smart TVs sit in living rooms and bedrooms, combining microphones and internet connections in the most private spaces of a home. This episode shows how a carefully worded corporate denial can be technically defensible while leaving the substance of a privacy complaint unresolved. For buyers, it is a reminder that voice assistants and content-recognition features collect data by design, that "optional" settings are only as protective as the interfaces that disclose them, and that independent security research — rather than vendor statements — is often what reveals what a device actually does.