Its an old LG, but given the recent light on the lengths they’ll go to spy on us, I figured this guy was better off without any ability to even connect wirelessly. Don’t know if the Ethernet still works but I plan on keeping my TVs as dumb as possible, HDMI only.
If you’re wondering how to open lg TVs you just have to remove all the screws then start pulling open at the bottom and open the clips going up. With the TV face down on a soft surface just keep pulling on the back case from the bottom, it’ll take some effort to pop open. The top edge folds open more like a hidge than clips.
The problem is researchers found out that lg tvs will scan available ssids and connect to any network available to deliver its payload back to LG, without your knowledge or consent
Do you have neighbors with a non password protected gateway or router to the open internet? Open unsecured networks seem so rare these days.
Some devices can create unadvertised networks, they might just go over a list of possible ids
Hypothetically, if I were an evil data mining corporation, I would setup my devices to talk to each other on a proprietary protocol, so if any one of my devices has access to the internet, all of them could use it to exfil data. I’d also advertise and heavily incentivise users to download and install an app to “get the best experience” with my devices, and then use that app to exfil data from any of my devices, even if the person with the app doesn’t own them.
fucking printers. also tire pressure monitoring systems. if i were an evil corporation i would use TPMS to communicate
Also some ISPs will run public networks off of your hardware if you’re renting the modem.
our city (with good intentions) set up public hotspots all over town so people without internet at home could use free wifi during lockdowns. now half the town’s tvs probably update over them.
I have an offline LG TV and an open isolated guest network it could theoretically connect to. I check periodically and it has never attempted to do so.
Just an anecdote, but I personally have seen no evidence of this happening.
what the hell
what would happen if i set up a little router with a virtual internet right next to the tv? i was a hardware guy in the 90s so like, i am the teensiest bit out of date
If it can’t phone home and get a response it will fail over to searching for any open wifi it can find. You could put the TV in a metal box, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a TV.
i guess i wanted it to phone home on my fake internet? i am not the word good today, it is rehearsal day and i am thinking about music
It would be doing that, but it would also be trying to connect to any open WiFi available. Your neighbors xfinity modem that broadcasts their open public WiFi. Phones with hotspots. Anything it can, it will try to connect to. If it can’t make it out through that channel, it logs all that info to send when it can.
You would need to know how to answer it how it wants. Which is hard to do since it’s all sent encrypted.
okay, one of us needs to get LG’s pgp key so we can all do this thing…
Insane
Sanity has left us all since, erm, about 2001? Might be off with that estimate, but definitely before 2007!
Mind pointing to that researcher’s findings?
It was the gamers nexus report others are referencing, but apparently I misread from a secondary source. It seems it was inferred that that could be possible because the TV is logging all nearby networks via wifi and devices via bluetooth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA
At 1:01:16 for the network stuff
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9uefFYe6bM
Looks like that one is only ~30 minutes
You’re right, wrong video
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/lg-tv-shown-capable-of-tracking-user-activity-even-when-offline/
Is this what you’re talking about? It looks like it is speculation that they might connect to open wifi because they can, not any sort of reproduction or confirmation like the OP suggested
It’s something that has been said for years now about smart TVs in general not just LG, but I haven’t been able to find any conclusive evidence that it’s happening… And obviously it can’t be proven that it’s NOT happening.
I don’t disagree that it is a possibility it could start happening, but surely some security researcher would have reproduced it by now if it already was. The shit they are doing is bad enough that we don’t need to muddy the water with lies.
I agree. Making unsubstantiated claims is the best way to get your real concerns dismissed as conspiracy theories.
Read the arstechnica article, watch the videos linked in said article
It scans your network for devices, and they promote visibility to connected devices
That is not desirable, but it is also not
as stated in the comment I replied to asking for information
Gamers’ Nexus speculated on the ability to connect to the other SSIDs if memory serves, or did that ever get proven?
Not proven, but obviously that’s possible for any device with Wi-Fi, and it has happened with many other “smart” devices before
Sounds like we need to have some fake point where it can drop its package into instead. Make the TV think it uploaded successfully but it just goes into a trash can.
Somehow this can work with some DNS tinkering.
You’re thinking of a black hole. DNS wouldn’t do it. DNS just translates a domain name to an IP. If you know the IP, you can skip DNS entirely.
I’d also take a guess that whatever repository a spy devices is uploading to has some kind of handshake procedure. You don’t want you spy TV to upload all that juicy data to a competitor or a researcher.