Your TV Was Watching the Room
Most people assume that when a television is off, it’s off. LG’s G5 OLED TV, which retails at a premium price point, appears to behave differently. New evidence from a collaborative investigation between YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, hardware-focused channel Level1Techs, and a team of security researchers suggests the device actively scans local area networks – probing for other connected devices even when the television itself is powered down.
The findings were documented through packet captures, a method of recording data as it moves across a network. Those captures show the G5 OLED initiating contact with other devices on the same LAN – not just acknowledging their presence, but actively crawling the network to identify them.
What the Packet Captures Actually Show
Gamers Nexus editor-in-chief Steve Burke described the scope of what the team found. “The [G5] crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn’t even know we were working on this,” he said. That detail is worth sitting with: the TV identified personal devices belonging to people who had no knowledge of the investigation and no connection to the test environment beyond being physically nearby.
Packet captures are difficult to fake at scale and tend to hold up as evidence precisely because they record raw network traffic rather than surface-level behavior. The fact that Level1Techs, a channel with a technically sophisticated audience, co-signed the methodology adds weight to the findings. Security researchers were also involved in interpreting what the data showed, though the full technical report has not yet been independently peer-reviewed in an academic setting.
The G5 OLED sits at the top of LG’s 2025 television lineup and carries a price tag that puts it firmly in the luxury tier. Buyers at that price point tend to expect a product that respects the boundaries of their home network. Finding out the device was silently enumerating staff smartwatches – hardware that was never registered with the TV, never paired, never interacted with it in any way – moves this beyond a routine telemetry debate.
LG’s Broader Tracking History
LG is not new to questions about data collection. The company has faced scrutiny over its ACR – Automatic Content Recognition – technology, which monitors what’s displayed on the screen to serve targeted advertising. That system is at least disclosed in setup menus, even if the disclosure is often buried. What the Gamers Nexus investigation points to is a different layer: network-level scanning that operates independently of what’s on screen and apparently continues when the display is dark.
Network scanning of this kind, when done by a device without the owner’s explicit knowledge, raises questions that go beyond privacy preferences. A television that maps your LAN – cataloguing which phones, watches, and other hardware are present – is building a profile of household occupancy, device ownership, and potentially movement patterns. That data has commercial value, whether or not LG is actively monetizing it in this form.
What Owners Can and Can’t Do
LG’s smart TV platform, webOS, includes privacy settings, but the depth of control those settings actually provide over low-level network behavior is unclear. Most consumer routers don’t alert users when a device on the network initiates a scan. The behavior documented here would, in typical home setups, be entirely invisible without dedicated packet capture tools – hardware and software that the vast majority of LG G5 buyers don’t own and wouldn’t know how to use.
There are partial mitigations available to technically confident users. Placing the TV on a separate VLAN – a segmented portion of the network that can’t communicate with the primary subnet – would prevent it from reaching other devices. Some routers support this configuration natively. Most homes don’t have the hardware or setup to make it work, and LG has not publicly indicated it considers this a problem requiring a fix.
What makes the staff phone discovery particularly uncomfortable is the implied reach. Those weren’t test devices left in a controlled environment. They were personal phones carried by people who happened to be in the same building. A television that can identify a stranger’s smartwatch without any pairing event, any app install, or any user action is doing something most owners would not sanction if they were asked directly.
LG has not, as of publication, issued a detailed technical response to the Gamers Nexus findings. The company has not confirmed or denied that the G5 performs LAN scanning by design, whether it’s a feature, a bug, or a side effect of some other system running in the background. Burke’s team published video documentation. The packet captures exist. And somewhere on a network log, there’s a record of an LG television finding a smartwatch its owner didn’t know had been found.
