The LG Story Just Took a Much Bigger Turn.

GN tweeted that their LG follow-up is the worst thing they’ve dug into in a while. lawyers, security researchers, network people, something like 40,000 words of LG’s agreements getting gone through line by line. no report yet. that part’s still coming. but there’s enough already confirmed on its own that it’s worth just laying out plainly before the bigger piece drops.

monitor stuff first. GN bought an LG UltraGear, plugged it into a Windows PC, and watched Windows Update quietly install something called “LG Monitor App Installer.” no consent screen, nothing to click through, it just shows up a minute or so after the drivers do. and it’s not only new monitors either, they got the same behavior on a unit that was three years old, including one of their own workstation monitors. Steve Burke said on camera that once it’s installed the app has permission to basically everything, all system resources plus your internet connection, and read off a list that included geolocation, device data, online activity, contact data, and transaction data, don’t quote me on the exact order of that list, wasn’t taking notes when I watched it back. which is a lot of access for something whose only visible function is nagging you about a McAfee trial. 31 out of 32 boots showed the popup. I checked that number against a few other outlets that covered this separately and it holds up everywhere, so that’s not GN inflating anything.

LG did put out a statement on this, to TechRadar specifically. the short version is they said McAfee itself is never installed automatically or without you actively choosing to install it, and separately that the installer app doesn’t access, collect, or transmit customer personal data.

and reading that back, notice what it’s actually responding to. it’s answering “does McAfee get force-installed,” and fine, maybe the answer there really is no, you do have to click something for McAfee itself to land. but that was never really the complaint. the complaint is the App Installer, the thing that puts the McAfee popup in front of you in the first place, installs itself with zero prompt and reportedly has access to your location and device info. LG’s statement just doesn’t touch that part. doesn’t say why a monitor driver installer needs that kind of access, doesn’t address the no-consent install of the installer itself, doesn’t say anything about the ads.

so if anyone at LG is somehow reading a low-traffic blog post about this, here’s what I’d actually want asked. why does the installer need “all system resources” and contact data to push a McAfee popup. does LG’s monitor privacy policy disclose this app anywhere before purchase, because I went looking and could not find plain language covering it, might just be bad at searching though. and is there some kind of install-rate arrangement with McAfee behind the 31-out-of-32 number, my gut says probably not, but it’s an oddly consistent stat for something that’s supposedly incidental.

side thing, not really related but I noticed it while reading around this: Dell apparently does something similar with Alienware monitors, pushes Command Center through the same Windows device-metadata pipeline. pretty sure it’s not exactly the same severity, haven’t looked into whether Dell’s version reaches for your contact list too, just noting LG isn’t the only company using this specific Windows feature to shove software onto people. might say more about Microsoft’s Hardware Support Apps system than about LG specifically. anyway.

then the TV side. LG updated its terms of service so that if the TV’s voice features happen to pick up a guest’s voice, getting that guest’s consent beforehand is your responsibility, not LG’s, and they disclaim liability if you skip it. the actual clause sits under a section LG calls “AI-Based Services” and covers family members, guests, children, and bystanders, saying it’s “your sole responsibility to obtain all necessary consents from any third parties.” somebody pointed out the obvious hole here, minors can’t legally consent to that in the first place, so the clause is asking households to do something that isn’t fully possible to begin with.

LG’s response to that one: TVs do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations, voice recognition is opt-in, only activates when you deliberately trigger it.

might be completely accurate. I don’t have visibility into how their voice pipeline actually works internally, nobody outside LG really does. but they’ve made this exact type of claim recently and it didn’t hold up great. back in December LG force-installed Microsoft Copilot onto smart TVs as a system component, no announcement, no way to uninstall it, people found out because it just appeared on their home screens after a firmware update. when that blew up LG’s response was that Copilot is “not an application-based service” and that microphone input only activates with the customer’s consent, same shape of reassurance they’re using now for the voice recording question. so if the pattern is “installed without asking, but don’t worry, it’s consent-based and opt-in,” this is the second time in under a year they’ve said that about a different feature.

theres also the older stuff, if I remember right an LG TV got caught back in 2013 sending viewing data to LG unencrypted and without asking first, and Samsung ran a nearly identical version of this in 2015 with voice data specifically, publicly said their TVs don’t listen to living rooms while their own privacy policy quietly said spoken words could get sent to a third party. different company in Samsung’s case, but same industry, same tone of denial, same eventual walk-back.

back to the actual tweet since that’s what started this. GN says they’ve got lawyers, security researchers, and network people going through roughly 40,000 words of LG’s various agreements, and that it’s taking a while because there’s just a lot there. Burke also mentioned he’s personally sunk a few thousand dollars into buying more LG hardware just to keep testing, said every purchase reveals another layer of it, called it something like an “enshittified onion,” which is a phrase I keep coming back to.

so where’s that leave things right now, not much beyond what’s already public. a monitor installer that answers a different question than the one being asked, and a TV clause that shifts liability onto you for people who, in some cases, legally cant even give the consent it’s asking for. LG’s had this same “don’t worry, it’s opt-in” line fall apart before, most recently seven months ago on a completely different feature. the actual material is apparently still sitting in those 40,000 words with the lawyers. until that’s out this is mostly just this, a company answering the questions it wants to answer instead of the ones being asked. don’t know yet if the next piece ends up bigger than the Copilot thing was. guess we’ll find out.