LG's flagship TVs have been caught quietly scanning home networks for other devices.
YouTube channels Gamers Nexus and Level1Techs, working with security researchers, captured and analyzed network traffic from LG televisions, including the pricey G5 OLED. The packet captures showed the TVs actively scanning the local network for other connected devices, not just sitting passively on Wi-Fi. Gamers Nexus editor-in-chief Steve Burke said the G5 "crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn't even know we were working on this." That means the TV identified hardware belonging to people who had no idea an investigation was underway.
This goes beyond the usual smart-TV complaint about viewing-habit tracking. A television actively mapping every phone and smartwatch on a network is a different kind of data collection, and it's not clear what LG does with that inventory once it has it. For a device that sits in the living room and is rarely rebooted or scrutinized, that's a lot of quiet visibility into who else lives in the house.
Smart TVs already normalized always-on viewing surveillance through automatic content recognition. Turning the same hardware into a LAN scanner is the next logical, and more unsettling, step.