Yes, it's for "easy searching." I dunno about current offerings, but even Roku boxes from five-ish years ago had them; you'd hold a button and talk into the remote.

Yeah? It's to use voice controls. Been a thing even before "smart" TVs.

Have you been living under a rock? Microphone-equipped remotes have been a thing for years.

Yep. Smart TVs doing Smart TV things.

People will literally buy anything that invades their privacy

Just change your wifi password and never let it online ever again

That doesn't work, though. Sound will penetrate that fairly easily. It'll be muffled slightly, but not enough to do anything.

Probably would do little to prevent it from listening though.

Oh don't worry. These tech companies pretty much all do this. If the TV's aren't listening and even watching us. It are our iOS and Android based smartphones and watches. Our in home smart cloud connected "security" camera's. Our 'smart' doorbells, fridges, ovens. Our Windows/Macbook laptops. Our cars.

We're already long passed the dystopian threshold.

The worst part is, the vast majority of people chose for this and socially shunned people that never opted in for this 1984 bullshit.

LG is nothing, last year Apple settled for spying on their users. Nobody cared. Facebook has been charged for this, multiple times, nobody cares considering the popularity of Whatsapp and Instagram to this day. Everybody goes wild about the new iPhone, haha, it's an absolute privacy nightmare that's spying 24/7.

LG is just a popular target now because they're Asian.

GamersNexus just dropped a pretty damning video on LG's data collection practices. Their TVs record absolutely everything from their microphones and cameras (if equipped - some are), sniff out everything using wifi and bluetooth within its vicinity, and sends it ALL back to LG. It does this even when the TV is "turned off", storing the data until it's reconnected to the internet. And yes - that includes the remote's microphone.

My theory is that this is why modern "smart" TVs end up grinding to a halt after a short-ish period of time when not connected to a network. Data just sits and fills up the internal storage until there's no more space for other processes to function. This happened to a Vizio we bought recently - I ended up factory resetting it and suddenly it worked perfectly. Never connected to the network.

data privacy

Except they can still scan for and communicate with any nearby BT/WiFi connections, and some sets even have 4G/5G modems embedded now.

Vlan-ed it years ago, running on some old 2021 firmware. And it so snappy and clean. (I only use Wake On Lan for the TV, to sync up with the PC)