Depending on the TOS details, that may very well be a legit crime. Even in 1-party consent states this wouldn't slide because LG isn't a participant in the conversations it's recording, and not everyone talking near a TV has agreed to the TOS.

And even with generous TOS, there's gonna be legal issues. HIPAA, for instance, could really fuck them if the TVs are in a medical facility and are recording and transmitting private medical data without consent of the patients.

Fucking hell we have two of these at home.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/09/07/disconnect-your-lg-television-from-the-internet-now

What about the larger companies with LG tvs in their offices?

Media bullshit at work gets its own isolation VLAN.

If they were serious enough to buy serious equipment, I wouldn't have to do it. I'd still do it, but I wouldn't have to.

It is common behavior for a lot of consumer IoT devices. If it goes on your network and you don't control the software, you should consider it compromised. Even if the manufacturer isn't doing outright malicious stuff, it likely isn't secured very well (they never are) so there's every chance that someone else could find it and use it as a platform for malicious activity.

It is common, RTINGS did a video on it.

I need to learn how to do this

No. They need life in prison. Hundreds of them.

I found it to be a struggle to find a non-smart TV that was decent...

Its all of them. The only tvs that aren't doing this are dumb ones. The reason why they're so cheap is that they are selling data. Its been this way for years.

LG owns an advertising company. Just like Google tracks everything you do on the internet via their analytics and search products and then feeds you targeted ads, LG tracks everything you watch, all the electronics in your house, and any conversations you have nearby, then feeds you ads through their TVs.

Just like google is an advertising company first and everything else second it's probably a good idea to think of LG as an advertising company that happens to have a consumer electronics company bolted on. Their TVs are nothing but trojan horses these days, designed to spy on everything they can and get ads in front of your face.

Mostly targeting advertising. The original source is the GamerNexus video. They show in great details the kind of information they capture and give potential usage for it. For instance they can detect thermostats, air conditioning units and air purifier that may be on the network, products that LG also sells. They give another example: if they see you have an iPhone 13, they may send you ads for the new iPhone 17.

If you can detect and identify the other devices on the LAN, you know exactly which other smart devices the customer has, and at scale that's very valuable market research. They could probably even start sending ads to customers for an LG replacement if a device drops off the network.

Hate to break it to you, but AppleTV really is the best option.

I haven’t tried it, but I would think that running something shitty like a Roku but gating it with a pi-hole would be reasonable. You just have to make sure that there’s no open networks within reach (neighbors, etc).

the older my Shield gets, the more I end up looking at the apple TV as the least worst of the bunch. until some foss Linux approach gets easy enough for me to be satisfied it won't drive the rest of the household mad, that is