July 21, 2026
Your TV’s side hustle is over
LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps
LG finally cracks down after fans ask: why was your TV doing this in the first place?
TLDR: LG says it will pull smart TV apps that secretly use your television to help carry strangers’ internet traffic, after research found the practice was widespread. Commenters were split between relief and suspicion, with many asking why this was ever allowed and some joking their TV isn’t even online enough to pull this off.
LG just made a very public about-face: it says apps for its smart TVs will be suspended if they keep turning people’s living-room screens into always-on internet middlemen for strangers. That follows research from Spur finding that more than 42% of apps in LG’s TV app store included this kind of software, often tucked into simple games, screensavers, and utility apps. In plain English: your TV may have been helping route other people’s online traffic without most owners truly realizing it.
But the real fireworks were in the comments, where the top reaction was basically: why on earth wasn’t this banned already? One reader flatly asked, “why didn’t they do that from the start,” which pretty much captured the collective side-eye. Another commenter wondered if LG’s announcement was a convenient distraction from the company’s other awkward headline this week, after criticism over LG monitor software pushing McAfee promotions through Windows Update. Ouch.
Not everyone was furious, though. One hot take argued that sharing a bit of your home internet “in exchange for something of value” sounds fair enough, setting up the thread’s mini culture war: harmless trade-off or sneaky behavior on a device people don’t think of as a computer? Meanwhile, the mood swung from outrage to relief, with one person cheering, “Finally good news for once!” and another dropping the funniest accidental flex in the thread: “My TV doesn’t know my router’s wi-fi password.” In a debate full of privacy panic, that was the closest thing to a mic drop.
Key Points
- •LG Electronics USA said it will suspend webOS smart TV apps that keep residential proxy functionality if developers do not remove it.
- •Spur found more than 42% of apps on LG’s smart TV app store and more than a quarter of apps on Samsung’s Tizen platform included residential proxy SDKs.
- •LG Senior Vice President John Taylor said residential proxy networking is not an intended use for LG smart TVs and that app review is already underway.
- •Spur reported that Bright Data accounted for a majority of the proxy SDKs found across LG and Samsung smart TV apps.
- •The article also noted separate criticism of LG after Gamers Nexus reported that some LG monitors install an app promoting McAfee subscriptions via Windows Update without user approval.