On 6 September the hardware channel Gamers Nexus published a 135-minute investigation into LG smart televisions, carried out with Level1Techs and three independent security researchers. The sets were retail units, including the flagship G5, and the method was packet captures and a firmware teardown rather than a reading of the privacy policy. Outlets carried it the following day.
The finding that gives this issue its rule is what happened when the team disconnected the Ethernet cable and went on talking. The television did not stop recording; it wrote the voice input to local storage, and when the connection came back the accumulated files went up. Pulling the lead did not switch the recording off. It postponed it.
The rest of what they measured sits around that. The microphone window stays open for ten to fifteen seconds of silence after somebody stops speaking, which is long enough to catch a sentence that was never addressed to the set; the voice log sits on the device in plain text; bench tests recorded intelligible speech from forty to seventy feet. Separately from the microphone, the sets sweep the home network and write down hardware that has nothing to do with television -- phones, watches, printers, switches, climate gear -- along with the names and signal strengths of the neighbours' Wi-Fi. LG's advertising arm claims access to 363 million secondary devices in the United States alone, against roughly 216 million televisions sold worldwide, and its pitch to buyers is that it owns the glass.
What the report does not say is worth saying too. No recording is shown being used against anybody. The dispute is not over whether the set listens without its trigger word -- it is over how long the window stays open after one. Remote code execution flaws in webOS were reported and are being handled quietly, with no claim that anyone exploited them. And the agreement LG signed with the Texas attorney general in May covered consent for content recognition; it did not cover the microphone or the network sweep.