Your LG TV knows where you live. The spy in your living room may or may not know your name. But it can find your home on a map. It knows the name of your wifi network, and all your neighbors’ wifi networks, so pinpointing you on a map isn’t hard. Your wifi network name may or may not be unique but the combination in your neighborhood probably is. It knows what’s on your home network too.
It knows what you watch, too. Even if you aren’t using their apps to watch.
Why televisions spy on you
And this is immensely profitable, because they can sell this information. And this information affects the ads you see and the prices you pay for things.
The last time I was in the market for a car, I looked up a couple of local dealers. I checked their hours and checked their inventory online. And the next thing I knew, I was seeing ads for that make of car on my work computer, on my phone, and I kid you not, on a TV in a store.
Advertisers love this because they know I’m at least halfway interested. It’s much better than just buying ads based on demographics alone.
How it works
And how could they follow me around? My phone, of course. But I didn’t search for the car on my phone. I searched it on a computer at home. So how did that innocent search on a computer at home follow me around other places? Well, I owned an LG TV connected to my home network. Based on that, it knew my IP address. It also knew my phone, from being on the same network as my phone. So one or the other of those linked my work computer to that web search. Maybe the oddly specific car ads on the TV in the store were a coincidence. But in theory that wouldn’t have to be, because major retailers track you by your phone.
And that affects the price you pay for things. Retailers know that people with certain makes of computers and phones, especially the higher-end models, are likely to have more disposable income and the ability to pay more. They can probably infer from the neighborhood you live in if you’re the type who is willing to pay more. And if they know the TV shows you watch and the music you listen to, they can infer even more from you. Then imagine what they can do when they layer in what you’ve liked on social media, or keywords from social media posts.
They already have a dossier on you based on your past purchases. They’ve been doing that for a decade and a half or more. But when they can correlate your purchase history with information about the neighborhood you live in and what smart devices are on your wifi, they can change the price you pay for things.
Digital pricing/surge pricing/exploitation
Digital price tags are controversial, and they aren’t everywhere. But they don’t need digital price tags when you shop online. The price online doesn’t necessarily match what’s in the store. They can adjust the online price based on what they think you’ll pay. And they do. We may not even notice because it’s so much more convenient to order online, pay, then get a text when our order is ready and go pick it up out of a locker. Or just have it delivered.
That convenience is worth something. But someone who lives a mile from you may be getting a better price just because they live on a different street. They might even be getting the same convenient and a discounted price.
You’ve probably seen this before, where you shop online, then go to the store to get it and find the price in the store is wildly different. Then you ask someone. You pull it up on your phone, they see the lower price, and give it to you.
But there are some disturbing implications about this too. Someone trying to cut down on drinking could get bombarded with beer commercials, especially at certain times of the day. This could potentially have long-term health implications.
Someone who’s sick might suddenly have to pay $34 for a can of soup where someone else is paying 34 cents, just because the person who’s sick is unable to cook and willing to pay more.
So just because you have nothing to hide doesn’t mean you should think it’s OK that your TV is spying on you. Large corporations can buy that information, compile a dossier on you, and manipulate you into spending more, and paying more.
My college economics professor would have thought this was fantastic. But there’s a big problem with it. How are you supposed to budget when a week’s worth of groceries costs $100 one week and $1,000 the next?
So what can you do about it?
I won’t put a smart TV on my home network anymore. If the TV has smart functionality, I leave it disconnected. LG TVs aren’t alone in this behavior but they’re the worst. It kind of makes sense since they control the operating system on their TVs, rather than licensing it from someone else.
If you’ve already connected an LG TV, open up its configuration, navigate to the wifi connection, disable its wifi, then scroll down to your wifi network, select the button next to it, then press the button to forget the network. With no network connection, it will continue to spy, but will have noplace to send the data. Although it does scan for unconnected networks, as of 2026, LG TVs don’t connect to unsecured networks without asking. And hopefully none of your neighbors are operating unsecured wifi networks.
But Apple, Google, and Roku aren’t your friends either. I use a homebrew streaming device I run on cheap, readily available hardware. If you’re not comfortable loading LineageOS on a device and sideloading apps on it, a set-top box gives you more control than built-in smart TV functionality at least.
When you go shopping, leave your phone in your car. It makes you harder to track in-store, and makes digital price tags a little less effective. If they’re engaging in facial recognition, that’s harder to defeat.
And of course, when stores engage in digital price tags and other forms of manipulative pricing, shop elsewhere. They’re looking to see what we’ll tolerate.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.