A new critique of LG’s smart-TV privacy posture says the conversation around the company’s devices needs more care than the most alarmist summaries have given it. On the event date, September 8, 2026, a Leaflet.pub post responding to the GamersNexus investigation argued that some of the network activity shown in the video may be normal for connected devices, while still acknowledging that there are real privacy and security questions around LG’s ad tech and telemetry.
The post does not dismiss the subject outright. It accepts that the television logs search terms and that the device exposes information tied to advertising and telemetry endpoints. It also says LG’s smart TVs can indeed behave like listening devices in some circumstances, and that the company’s own systems can collect more than many users would expect from a television. But the author repeatedly questions whether the video proves every claim in the strongest form.
One of the main objections is about interpretation. The post says that some of the local-network discovery shown in the investigation could reflect ordinary device discovery protocols such as mDNS, SSDP and reverse DNS, rather than evidence of uniquely suspicious behavior. In the author’s view, a smart appliance on a home network can legitimately see other IoT hardware, media devices and shared services. That does not make the device harmless, but it does mean the mere presence of such traffic is not enough to prove abuse.
The post also argues that encrypted traffic weakens some of the strongest claims in the video. According to the author, Wireshark screenshots alone do not show payload contents, only endpoints, DNS activity and request sizes. Without a man-in-the-middle setup to inspect the certificates and decrypt traffic, the post says it is harder to prove exactly what data was sent and how it was used. That does not eliminate privacy concerns, but it does change the strength of the evidence.
Even so, the critique still lands on a serious point: LG’s smart-TV stack appears capable of collecting a lot of information, and that creates risk whether or not every single interpretation in the original video is correct. The post says ACR-style fingerprinting, telemetry tied to channel use, and ad-driven data collection all show why users should care. Its argument is more limited than the original investigation’s, but not comforting.
The author also notes that some of the issues may not be unique to LG. Several streaming and ad-supported systems rely on similar infrastructure, and some of the same patterns could exist across other brands and services. If that is true, the deeper problem is not a single vendor but a category of connected-device behavior in which televisions operate like small computers with a strong incentive to report back home.
The practical conclusion is still fairly blunt. The post says users who want to reduce exposure should understand that a networked television is not the same as a passive monitor. It may be possible to isolate it, block it, or strip back its connectivity, but the underlying business model remains built around data collection and service analytics. For the author, that is enough reason to remain skeptical, even while demanding more careful proof for the most explosive claims.
That makes the critique useful in its own right. It does not exonerate LG. It simply says the evidence should be read precisely. In a privacy story where sensational claims can travel faster than the packet captures that support them, that distinction matters.
