216 million TVs, one denial, and no way for you to check
An online investigation says LG televisions track viewers and record audio. LG says that's not true. Your living room is the place where those two statements collide.
The claim is simple and uncomfortable: an online investigation says 216,000,000 LG TVs spy on their owners and record audio. LG has answered just as simply — it strongly denies it, calling the tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'.
That's the whole story, and that's exactly the problem. Two flat statements, pointing in opposite directions, about a box that sits in millions of living rooms and has been switched on the entire time this argument was happening.
When a company denies something, most people quietly assume the truth is somewhere in the middle. Here there is no middle. Either the microphone in that TV is doing something with what it hears, or it isn't. One of these two versions is wrong, and the person who owns the television has no realistic way to find out which one.
That's the part worth sitting with. You can check your bank statement. You can't check your TV.
216,000,000 is not a niche number. It's the kind of figure that means this isn't about one unlucky model or one bad firmware update — it's about a product category that people buy once and keep for a decade, without ever reading what it sends home. And unlike a phone, a TV has no permission prompt that most owners remember agreeing to.
Anyone who bought a smart TV because it was on sale and never opened the settings menu — which is most people. Younger renters especially: a TV is often the one expensive thing in a shared flat, bought second-hand or on installments, set up in five minutes by whoever got there first, and never touched again. And parents, who put the biggest screen in the room where the family actually talks.
LG has denied the claims. The investigation stands by them. Neither side, in what we've seen, has named a date, a regulator or a next step — so what happens now, nobody has said. Watch for one thing only: whether either party publishes something checkable, rather than another statement.
Notice what the argument is not about. Nobody is disputing that the TV can hear. The dispute is only about what it does with that. That question was settled the day the microphone went in — everything since is a matter of trust.
Sources: Reddit r/technology, post "LG strongly denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true' — online investigation claims 216,000,000 TVs spy and record audio", linking to Tom's Hardware.
Расследование утверждает, что 216 млн телевизоров LG собирают данные о зрителях вплоть до аудио, а компания это отрицает — редкий случай, когда официальная версия прямо расходится с тем, что нашли в данных устройства в гостиной читателя.
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