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Getting tired of people doing a bunch of llm assisted reverse engineering and making big claims about devices (cough LG and other TVs) and not providing evidence to support these claims. It goes without saying that pretty much all are spying on you, but how it does that matters..

One key example is the claim from GamersNexus video about how LG TVs attempt to connect to open WiFi networks to exfil voice transcriptions. If true, this would be super evil. After reviewing dozens of firmware variants for LG, I have found no evidence of this.

I even spun up fake APs and tested this as well, on multiple LG TVs, including the exact one featured in the video, the LG G5. None connected to me! While I don't put it past any company to be this scummy, there was no proof in the pudding.

Additionally, the claim that the LG TVs do nmap style scans of the network were also unsubstantiated. The TV does mdns and service discovery scans, but it doesn't aggressively scan individual devices based on what I've seen.

Now, all of this could be happening in some model I didnt look at, or by some app loaded after provisioning, but after buying the exact TV as the video (needed a new one anyway lol) and setting it up in the same way, I didn't see the same things.