LG Is Turning TVs and Monitors Into Surveillance Devices, and Telling You to Warn Your Guests

A TV should show a picture and play the matching sound. A monitor should display what your computer sends it. Neither should surveil your home, record your voice, or silently install antivirus ads on your PC. LG is doing all of it, and the fine print says the monitoring is your problem to disclose.

A Gamers Nexus investigation published this week pulled together something a lot of us have felt for years: LG’s displays have stopped being displays. The TVs listen and profile. The monitors reach into your Windows PC and install software you never asked for. And LG’s own terms of service hand the legal risk of all that recording straight back to you.

I want to walk through what was actually found, quote the sources directly so nobody has to take my word for it, and then say plainly why I think this is a line no display should cross.

The monitor problem: plug it in, get spyware and McAfee ads

This is the part that should alarm anyone who thinks a monitor is a passive device. Gamers Nexus bought an LG UltraGear 34GX900A-B (reported at around $1,200) and connected it to clean Windows 11 machines. Just connecting it was enough.

As Notebookcheck summarized the findings:

As soon as a monitor is connected to a Windows computer, it automatically installs both the LG Monitor App Installer and McAfee Scam Detector without ever asking the user for permission. According to its own documentation, the LG Monitor App Installer has full access to “all system resources” and collects data on the user’s location, hardware, online activity, account logins, and contact information.

Read that permission list again. Location, hardware, online activity, account logins, and contact information. For a monitor. A monitor’s job is to receive a video signal and show it. It has no business knowing your location or reading your account logins.

The delivery method matters too. This is not a driver. Per The FPS Review, Windows Device Setup Manager matches the connected hardware to a Microsoft Store listing and installs the companion app in the background, no notification and no consent prompt. The app shows up in Reliability Monitor as 9PM9N6F47JB8-LGElectronics.LGMonitorApp, as TechSpot documented from the original Reddit report by user Mags_Smash.

And the first thing this uninvited software does is sell you something. According to the Gamers Nexus testing reported by OtakuKart, across 32 consecutive system boots the McAfee promotion appeared 31 times. The FPS Review put the absurdity of it well:

An app installed by a DisplayPort cable that leads with a paid antivirus trial has no functional relationship to display output. The McAfee prompt is simply an ad, distributed through Windows infrastructure, delivered by a device the customer already paid for.

To be fair to the facts: Gamers Nexus said it found no evidence that the monitor software captures screen content, and it is continuing the work with security researchers. But “we did not catch it recording your screen” is a very low bar for a monitor that grants itself access to all system resources and your logins.

This is not only LG, either. TechSpot and The FPS Review note the same auto-install pattern with Dell and Alienware monitors (Alienware Command Center) and Asus motherboards (Armoury Crate), and complaints on Microsoft’s own Tech Community forums date back to November 2024 with no fix from Microsoft or LG.

The TV problem: your voice, and a demand that you warn your guests

The TV side is worse, because it involves your microphone and the people in your home.

LG’s current terms of service reserve the right to record and analyze conversations to “improve” its AI services. Here is how Notebookcheck described the obligation LG puts on you:

According to the Terms of Service, it is the user’s responsibility to ensure that no wiretapping, surveillance, or data protection laws are violated; the user must inform all guests and family members that they are currently being recorded. If anyone objects, all microphone and voice related features on the smart TV must be disabled.

Sit with that. LG built a television that can capture voices, and rather than take responsibility for the legality of recording people, it wrote a clause that makes you responsible for complying with wiretapping and eavesdropping law, and requires you to notify every family member and guest that they are being recorded. A company does not write a sentence like that by accident. It writes it because it knows the recording raises real wiretapping questions, and it wants the liability sitting on the customer instead of the manufacturer.

The false choice: privacy or security, pick one

Say you do not want the new terms. On older sets you can refuse the webOS update that introduces them. But as Notebookcheck notes, if you decline the update, the TV stops receiving security patches. The Gamers Nexus write up, via OtakuKart, framed it as a forced choice:

Users who decline the new terms could lose access to certain security-related updates, creating what the investigation describes as a choice between maintaining privacy preferences and continuing to receive software support.

That is a rigged deal. Security updates and data collection terms are two completely separate things. Bundling them so that protecting your privacy means running unpatched software is coercion dressed up as a settings menu.

This is already illegal in at least one state

None of this is hypothetical or new. In 2025 the Texas Attorney General sued LG and four other TV makers over Automated Content Recognition, the technology that fingerprints everything on your screen. The state’s petition did not mince words:

LG Smart TVs are watching you back. LG TVs aren’t just entertainment devices. Through Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, LG secretly monitors what consumers watch across streaming apps, cable, and even connected devices like gaming consoles or Blu-ray players. This isn’t a glitch or side effect. It’s deliberate. LG harvests this data, builds profiles of consumers’ behavior, and sells it for profit.

The petition also alleges ACR captures viewing information “every 10 milliseconds” and pulls it from HDMI ports, cable boxes, DVD and Blu-ray players, gaming consoles, and laptops connected as monitors. In other words, the TV spies on whatever you plug into it, not just its own apps.

On May 11, 2026, LG settled. Under the deal LG must obtain informed consent before collecting viewing data through ACR, show a clear pop-up disclosure, give an easy opt-out, and is prohibited from transferring viewing data to the Chinese Communist Party. LG admitted no wrongdoing. Samsung settled on similar terms in February 2026, and per the Texas AG the cases against Sony, TCL, and Hisense are still pending. This is an industry-wide business model, and LG is just the one holding this week’s headline.

My take

A display is one of the simplest contracts in your home. You send it a signal, it shows you the signal. That is the entire job. Everything LG has bolted on top of that, the microphones, the content fingerprinting, the location-aware PC software, the McAfee ad pipeline, exists to turn a thing you bought into a thing that watches you and sells what it sees.

The wiretapping clause is the tell. When a manufacturer writes into its own terms that you must warn your guests they are being recorded and that keeping the law is your job, it has already conceded that its product does something a reasonable person would find alarming. It is not protecting you. It is protecting itself from you.

And the monitor behavior crosses a boundary that should not even be up for debate. My computer is mine. Connecting a screen to it should not trigger a silent install of a background app that claims all system resources and my logins, and then nags me to buy antivirus I never wanted. That is the exact behavior we would call malware if a stranger did it. A brand name on the box does not change what the software does.

I run my own privacy-first tools and I am building a Linux distribution precisely because I am tired of hardware that treats the owner as the product. This is the same fight as the digital ownership stories I have covered here. You paid for the device, but the vendor still reaches in and takes what it wants.

So my position is simple. Do not connect these to the internet if you can avoid it. Treat a smart TV as a dumb panel. And do not accept that a monitor gets to install anything at all.

How to protect yourself right now

Practical steps pulled from the reporting above:

Do not connect the TV to your network. A TV with no internet cannot phone home. Use a separate streaming box or a PC you control for apps.
If it must be online, block it at the network level. A firewall rule or a DNS sinkhole (Pi-hole and similar) can cut off the telemetry endpoints while still letting you stream.
Turn off the microphone and ACR in settings, and decline voice and “personalized” advertising agreements during setup.
On Windows, stop the monitor app from auto-installing. Per TechSpot and The FPS Review: open gpedit.msc, go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Installation, and enable Prevent installation of devices that match… device metadata (the policy that blocks automatic download of apps tied to device metadata). Disabling the Microsoft Store via Group Policy is the heavier option.
Check what is already there. Run perfmon /rel (Reliability Monitor) or look in Event Viewer for LGElectronics.LGMonitorApp. You can stop it launching under Settings > Apps > Startup, though note it cannot be uninstalled through the Microsoft Store.
Vote with your wallet. Gamers Nexus flat out recommended not buying LG displays until this is fixed. That is the message manufacturers actually hear.