The LG Smart TVs we’ve tested have first-party ACR (automatic content recognition) functionality that can pry into your personal life with greater precision than you might realize, with LG Ad Solutions’ executives and leadership saying, on camera, that LG “owns the glass.” Not you – even though you bought it – but them. They also talk about knowing everybody in the household, knowing the secondary devices, moving from TVs to smartphones and other screens, and more in their B2B discussions. Beyond just the fact that we think the TV’s native behavior parallels malware, the LG Smart TVs we tested also have a number of security vulnerabilities that can be exploited to convert the TVs into covert listening devices. In this investigation, we dive into the mix of LG’s first-party functionality that (in our opinions) is tantamount to spying and LG’s vulnerabilities and exploits that they have failed to protect against.
The only good scanner is your frontal lobe. Most scanners are a scam prying on fear of the uneducated. Every smart device is a potential attack vector, and there are two class of entities that can use your device maliciously. Black hat hackers that put malware for residential proxy services or manufactures selling data to advertisers. There are ways to mitigate the risk like air-gapping, putting them on separate network, jailbreaking and buying dumb devices.