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GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea

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Why This Matters

A skeptical technical commentary picks apart GamersNexus's viral claims that LG smart TVs can act as eavesdropping devices, arguing the evidence shown — voice search results logged in plain JSON on the device — reflects expected behavior rather than covert recording. It matters because smart TV privacy and ad tech are legitimate concerns, but sensational framing can obscure what the real risks are, especially when the findings depend on rooting the device first.

Key Takeaways
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Whenever I get to see companies eat shit over bad security, shady business practices, and both, I’m excited. And GamersNexus is here to deliver the goods about LG and their smart TVs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

“LG TVs are able to be utilized as eavesdropping listening devices, in part because of the advertising functionality.”

Now that’s a claim! I’m pumped. On screen, we see log information from the TV, highlighted as unformatted JSON, that includes statements such as “My credit card information” and “My Social Security Number is…”. Pausing and looking at the rest of the logs, we can see that they show the response to the search query (“Here are the search results for My credit card information”).

ALT LG WebOS Log Information. "My social security number is 1 1 1 1 1 1 " highlighted

Looking at it, my assumption about the order of operations here is:

They initiated the search.

Said stuff

The OS posted the search and returned the results.

Logged the actions into a file.

So it’s not always recording and transcribing, at least; they did a voice search. You can make a valid argument for storing these logs alongside the search history (Transcribed or otherwise; I will assume the same would happen if you literally typed them in). It’s not ideal to have that available on device, but it's not the worst issue I’ve seen. I continue the video.

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