No mic? Samsung TVs may hijack your soundbar to listen in, researcher claims

A security researcher who goes by log4j on X started digging into a 2025 Samsung TV after it kept serving up oddly specific ads. The researcher has been posting findings from its Tizen software since October 21. The latest batch is about sound.

According to log4j, Samsung’s telemetry includes counters for dog-barking and baby-crying events. These are under an event called EV201/SOUNDSENSOR_ON. Other entries include a software flag for the ambient light sensor, camera-state fields and camera streaming duration. The data goes out as key-value pairs and gets logged to one of Samsung's cloud servers.

The detection itself is no secret, though. Samsung does advertise Pet Care and Family Care on its 2025 Vision AI TVs. Both use on-device AI to pick up barking or crying and then send an alert through the SmartThings app. Pet Care, per Samsung, only works when the TV is switched off. What Samsung doesn’t explicitly add is that counts of those events are reported back to it, too.

log4j also claims that Samsung TVs without a microphone will look for a connected device that has one, like a soundbar or a Bluetooth speaker. That part itself is a little harder to understand. The researcher’s own notes say the counters don’t prove an alert was ever shown, and that the full lifecycle is still untraced. Another user, ngxson, watched a rooted Tizen TV open its mic for five seconds and then go quiet. They added that a stock TV might behave differently.

Elsewhere, log4j says the TV loads a region-specific neural network that tracks what happens inside apps like YouTube, ads skipped included. A full write-up of around 44 sections has been promised but wasn’t out at the time of writing.

Samsung isn’t alone here. In September, we covered a Gamers Nexus investigation showing LG smart TVs mapping devices on home networks and capturing mic audio in standby.

The South Korean tech giant hasn’t commented on any of this yet.