If you own a Samsung TV without a built-in microphone, it might still be listening to you, according to a researcher who shared his findings this week.
On the social media platform X, cybersecurity researcher @log4j shared that an investigation into Samsung smart TVs found that televisions without a mic will scan for connected devices that are equipped with a microphone. The smart TV will then utilize the audio data collected from the soundbar or other connected Bluetooth devices.
“This is pretty evil and clever,” @log4j said about their discovery.
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The researcher recently gained administrator root access to their own 2025 Samsung smart TV and has been sharing their findings in a series of posts on X.
Your smart TV is likely listening to you. At this point, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Many televisions advertise this functionality, since your TV has to be listening to you to take voice commands and interact with other smart home devices.
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However, other unadvertised and concerning privacy issues are arising from the device’s ability to listen in.
For example, @log4j started looking into their TV after receiving oddly specific advertisements and found that their television was logging things like “dog barking” and “baby crying” under an event called EV201/SOUNDSENSOR_ON.
As NotebookCheck.net points out, while Samsung 2025 Vision AI TVs advertise that the devices detect barking dogs and crying babies and send alerts through the company’s SmartThings app, Samsung does not advertise that this data is also sent back to the company.
Researcher @log4j also found that Samsung TVs track what happens inside specific apps. For example, the TV monitors what a user does in the YouTube app and even logs data such as the ads a user skips.
Mashable has reached out to Samsung for more information about the reports from @log4j and will update this piece when we hear back.
These privacy issues are not unique to Samsung TVs either. Last month, Mashable covered a report from YouTuber Gamers Nexus, which claimed to find that LG TVs were secretly recording users even when the televisions were turned off. LG later responded, denying some but not all the claims.
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