South Korean consumer-electronics company LG has denied allegations that its smart televisions record ambient conversations, listen while on standby and store recordings for later transmission. On Wednesday, the company told Al Jazeera that voice data is only recorded when a user presses and holds the voice button on the TV remote or activates its "Hi LG" wake word, after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature. "Other than these instances, the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations," LG said, adding that voice data is only processed via explicit user commands. "The audio is immediately deleted if the wake word is not recognised," the company said. The statement comes after a 135-minute investigative report released on Monday by a popular tech media outlet and YouTube channel, Gamers Nexus, with Level1Techs and independent security researchers.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Worried that your smart TV is spying on you? Here's what will help, and what won't. The impetus is a 135-minute video from Gamers Nexus, digging into the data that LG can collect from its users. The most shocking claim is that LG's TVs can persistently listen to what you're saying even when the power is off (albeit only if you plug in an external USB webcam).

Outside of Engadget's consumer-tech space, there are dozens of sites and YouTube channels that make a living covering PC hardware in extreme depth, looking at every aspect of a new product, tearing it down, examining circuitry and providing more insight than a general-purpose tech publication ever could. I follow a few of these specialists to stay up to date on the latest hardware. These come in a few flavors, from news-and-review websites like Anandtech to entertainment-focused channels like Linus Sebastian's Linus Tech Tips to the ultra-informative PC hardware site and YouTube channel Gamers Nexus. It's safe to say that these publications, and PC gamers in general, have not reacted very positively to NVIDIA's new GPUs. Many of the marquee features of the RTX line, namely hardware support for ray-tracing and machine learning acceleration, are bets on the future that have little to no impact on gaming as it exists today.