Is Your Smart TV Spying on You? What the LG Investigation Actually Found, and How to Turn It Off on Any TV
What's in this guide
On 7 September, the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus published a two hour investigation with the headline "216,000,000 Spy TVs" and a simple claim: LG smart TVs watch what you watch, scan your home network, and in some conditions keep listening after you think they have stopped. LG called the claims "not true" two days later. Then the channel published a rebuttal to the rebuttal.
If you own any smart TV, not just an LG, the useful question is not "who is right". It is "what does my TV actually collect, and how do I turn it off". I went through the investigation, LG's full statement and the privacy pages for every major TV platform, then spent an evening in the menus of the two TVs in my own house. Here is what I found, and the fifteen minute fix.
The short answer
Every major smart TV brand ships a feature called automatic content recognition, or ACR. It takes tiny samples of whatever is on your screen, including things plugged in over HDMI, works out what you are watching, and sends that viewing history to the manufacturer's advertising business. This is not an allegation. It is described in each company's own privacy notice, and it is the part of the LG story that nobody disputes. The disputed parts are about audio and standby behaviour, and those apply to LG specifically.
The fix has three levels. Level one is turning off ACR and ad personalisation in the settings, about fifteen minutes. Level two is never connecting the TV to the internet and using a streaming box instead. Level three is blocking it at your router. Most readers should do level one tonight and think about level two at their next TV purchase.
What the LG investigation claimed, and what LG admits
The Gamers Nexus report was made with Level1Techs and two independent security researchers, based on capturing the TV's network traffic and pulling apart its software. The claims fall into four groups.
Network scanning. The TVs look for other devices on your home Wi-Fi, such as phones, printers and smart home gear, and log what they find. LG confirms this. In its statement to Tom's Hardware it calls scanning for nearby devices "a standard function commonly provided by smart TVs and smart home devices".
ACR on everything, including HDMI. The TVs fingerprint audio and video to identify what is on screen, and that goes to LG Ad Solutions. LG confirms ACR exists and says it is opt-in. It also says ACR data is not used for advertising if you decline the optional agreement. Note the wording. That is a statement about how the data is used, not about whether it is collected.
Listening in standby. The researchers say the TV kept a microphone open while the screen was off and stored transcripts as plain text. LG partly confirms this. If you have turned on the "Hi LG" far-field voice feature, the TV does monitor for the wake word in standby, but LG says audio without the wake word is processed on the TV and deleted, never sent to a server.
Buffered uploads. The most viral moment in the video showed the researchers unplugging the TV's network cable, letting it sit, then plugging it back in and watching stored data upload. Gamers Nexus says that included audio transcripts. LG did not address this claim directly, and neither Tom's Hardware nor Al Jazeera has verified it independently. That is where things stand: reported by the researchers, denied in general terms, not independently confirmed.
Two things to keep in mind. The number in the headline is LG's own: its website says 216 million smart TVs worldwide and 49 million in the US. And this did not start with LG. In early 2026 the Texas attorney general sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR, and Samsung settled in March by agreeing to rewrite its consent screens for Texans. The LG video is the loudest chapter of a story that has been building all year.
What ACR actually is (and why every brand has it)
ACR is simple once you strip the jargon. Every few seconds, the TV grabs a small sample of the picture or the sound, turns it into a compact fingerprint, and compares it against a database of known shows, films, channels and adverts. When it finds a match it knows that your TV, at this address, played that programme at that time.
Two details make this more than a recommendations feature. It works on every input, so your cable box, games console and laptop are included, not just the TV's own apps. And the result is tied to an identifier for your household, then shared with advertisers and measurement companies. Roku's privacy documentation says that when the setting is on, it may share your viewing data with third parties "for measurement purposes". Samsung's ACR page says the data can include your viewing history, your Personalized Service ID and your IP address.
This is why the TV that cost you $400 was so cheap. The panel is the loss leader. The viewing data is the product.
What I found on my own TVs
I have an LG OLED in the living room and a Samsung in the bedroom, both set up in a hurry, which means I clicked "agree" on every screen to get to the football faster. I suspect that describes most homes.
On the LG, Live Plus (LG's name for ACR) was on. Interest-based advertising was on. The "Hi LG" far-field voice feature was on, and I do not remember choosing it. On the Samsung, Viewing Information Services was on, and so was interest-based advertising. Five tracking features across two TVs, all enabled, all consented to by me in the sense that I pressed a button years ago.
I also watched my router's device log for twenty four hours. The LG made outbound connections roughly every five minutes while sitting in standby with a black screen. That does not tell me what was in them, and it is consistent with boring things like update checks. But "the TV is off" clearly does not mean the TV is quiet.
Turning everything off took about six minutes per TV. Both work exactly as before. The only visible change is that the LG home screen now recommends things at random instead of things that are unnervingly on point.
How to turn off ACR on every major TV
Menu names move around between model years, so treat these as the path on current firmware. If you cannot find an item, search the settings for "privacy" and it will be nearby. Do all of the toggles in a section, not just the first one.
LG (webOS)
Press the gear button, then All Settings, then General, then System, then Additional Settings. Turn Live Plus off. Turn Limit Ad Tracking on. Then go back to General, then AI Service, and turn off the far-field "Hi LG" voice option unless you actually use it. Finally, open the User Agreements screen and withdraw the optional consents for viewing information and interest-based advertising.
Samsung (Tizen)
Press Home, then Settings, then All Settings, then General & Privacy, then Terms & Privacy (older sets have this under Support, then Terms & Privacy, then Privacy Choices). Turn Viewing Information Services off. In the same list, turn off Interest-Based Advertising and Voice Recognition Services if you do not use voice.
Roku TVs (TCL, Hisense, Philips, Roku branded)
From the home screen, go to Settings, then Privacy. Under Smart TV Experience, turn off Use info from TV inputs. That is the ACR switch, and it specifically covers HDMI and antenna. Then under Advertising, turn off Personalize ads and select Reset advertising ID.
Sony, TCL and Hisense running Google TV
Press Home, then Settings, then Privacy. Turn off Samba Interactive TV if it is listed, which is the ACR component many Google TV sets use. Under Ads, turn off ads personalisation. Under Usage & Diagnostics, turn everything off.
Amazon Fire TV (including Fire TV Omni sets)
Go to Settings, then Preferences, then Privacy Settings. Turn off Automatic Content Recognition, Device Usage Data, Collect App Usage Data and Interest-based Ads. Amazon's own help page notes that turning ACR off does not change how the device works, only that the ads you see may become more repetitive.
Vizio
Go to Settings, then All Settings, then Privacy & Legal (older models: Menu, then Admin & Privacy, or System, then Reset & Admin). Turn Viewing Data off. Vizio notes that a factory reset returns this to off, which is one of the few defaults in this industry that goes the right way.
What turning it off does not fix
Turning ACR off stops the TV from fingerprinting your screen. It does not stop the apps on the TV from logging what you watch inside them. Netflix knows what you watched on Netflix, and always will. It does not stop basic diagnostic and update traffic. And it does not touch the streaming box plugged into HDMI 1, which has its own settings and its own advertising ID.
It also does not fix the underlying issue, which is that the consent screens are designed to be agreed to. Samsung's settlement with Texas was about exactly this. After a big software update or a reset, expect to see those screens again, and expect the defaults to favour the manufacturer. That is why a quick check every couple of months is worth two minutes.
Three levels of fix: which one is right for you
Level one: turn the toggles off. Fifteen minutes, free, covers ACR and ad personalisation on any brand. This is the right answer for most people. Your TV keeps every feature you actually use.
Level two: never connect the TV to the internet. Buy a streaming box, plug it into HDMI, and leave the TV's Wi-Fi unconfigured. A TV with no connection cannot upload anything, whatever its firmware does. You are now trusting the box instead, so switch off its privacy settings too. This is what I will do at my next TV purchase. It removes the whole category of "what does the TV do when I am not looking".
Level three: block it at the router. If you want the TV online for updates but nothing else, most routers let you put a device on a guest network with no access to your other devices, and some let you block specific domains. This stops the network scanning from finding anything interesting. It is the most thorough option and the only one that needs technical patience. Skip it unless you enjoy this sort of thing.
The verdict
The LG investigation is still being argued over, and the audio claims may end up somewhere between what the researchers reported and what LG denies. But the part that matters for your living room was never in dispute. Every smart TV brand runs a content recognition system that watches your screen and feeds an advertising business, and it was turned on because you pressed "agree" during setup.
Do the fifteen minute version tonight. Go into the privacy settings on every TV in the house, turn off ACR and ad personalisation, and turn off any voice feature you do not use. Set a reminder to check again after the next big software update. And when this TV eventually dies, seriously consider buying the next one as a screen, plugging in a box you trust, and never giving the TV your Wi-Fi password at all.
If you liked the idea of keeping your data on your own hardware, the same thinking is behind running AI on your own computer and running AI on your phone without internet. The TV is just the device most people forget is a computer.
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