The Easy Way Is To Toss It Out And Buy From A Different Manufacturer
LG TVs are making the news again, and like the last time it’s not good news. Gamers Nexus have been doing a yeoman’s job at reporting the ridiculously invasive proclivities your LG TV engages in. They first called out LG for using Windows’ Automatic Installation feature to install the LG Monitor App, which among other things, served up ads on your desktop. Their investigations continued and what Gamers Nexus discovered is so much worse than just a pop up ad.
It seems that your LG TV is listening to you, even when it is asleep, for when they started monitoring the internet traffic generated by your LG TV they discovered “plaintext transcripts generated from audio captured by the TV“. That is not enough for LG though, as the traffic analysis revealed far more inappropriate behaviour. Wireshark discovered that the LG TV was also capturing the IP addresses, location data, names, signal strengths, and channel numbers of nearby Wi-Fi networks; not necessarily the ones it was connect to. On the network the LG TV was connected to, it would grab as much data from any device connected to that network, regardless if it has ever paired with the TV or not. The scope included any IoT device, from your smartphones and routers, to your thermostats, air purifiers, and of course, any and all connected PCs.
LG denies that they are being overly intrusive, stating that audio is only processed when the the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as ‘Hi LG’ is recognized. These features, including Automatic Content Recognition, need to opted into by the user, so they were informed of the possibility of monitoring voices in near proximity to the TV. LG also states that scanning for other devices sharing the same network as the LG TV is standard industry practice. This is sadly all too true. Finally LG also states that they do not “collect, record, or store ambient conversations”.
At this time it is impossible to say what is true and what is technically correct but not what users assumed they were opting in to.
If you want to stop this behaviour, be it innocuous or not, and aren’t ready to toss the TV out you can follow the steps provided by T3chFalcon on the site once known as Twitter. Get a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W or better and set up pi-hole or AdGuard Home, set up a firewall rule on the network to redirect any traffic using Port 53 to that pi–hole address on your router, block any outbound traffic on Port 853 and set up an alias of the known address that one of the LG TV services and deny them access to Port 443. You can’t block Port 443 outright as it will break your ability to stream properly. Finally set up a VLAN and segregate the TV to it, all by it’s lonesome.
As you can see, even if you already have a pi-hole set up, your router may not allow you to complete the steps, so it is up to you if you want to pick up additional networking equipment to fully block this behavior from your LG TV … or go back to the easy solution.
