Your smart TV is taking screenshots of your screen every 15 seconds. By Nav Toor.
A peer-reviewed study by researchers at UC Davis, UCL, and UC3M tested it.
Samsung TVs: every minute.
LG TVs: every 15 seconds.Even when you’re just using it as a monitor.
Your TV has a hidden feature called ACR — Automatic Content Recognition. It takes tiny snapshots of whatever you’re watching. Sends a fingerprint to the company’s servers. They match it to figure out exactly what’s on your screen. Every show. Every channel. Every game. Second by second. …
It tracks whatever is on screen. Your laptop. Your PlayStation. Your cable box. Anything plugged in through HDMI. …
ACR is turned ON by default during setup. You probably agreed to it. Buried inside a wall of terms and conditions on day one. … The opt-in takes one click. The opt-out takes 6. …
TV companies don’t just sell you a TV anymore. They sell your data. Vizio’s ad and data revenue hit $598 million in 2023. More than their hardware revenue. They make more money watching you than selling you the TV. LG’s ad business made nearly $700 million in 2024. …
The FTC found that Vizio went further. They matched your IP address to data brokers. Added your age, gender, income, and marital status. Then sold the full profile to advertisers. Source: FTC complaint against Vizio, 2017. …
82% of US TV households own a smart TV. The average home has two. Samsung alone has 73 million smart TVs in US homes. … If you own a TV made in the last 5 years, it’s probably doing this right now. Unless you’ve turned it off. …
The safest option? Disconnect your TV from Wi-Fi entirely. Use an Apple TV, Chromecast, or Roku stick for streaming instead. Run all your apps from the external device. But here’s the catch: The NY Times found that some TVs save your data locally. Then upload it all the next time you reconnect. So: disable ACR in settings AND disconnect from Wi-Fi. Both steps. Not just one.
Peter Girnus, a user interface researcher at Samsung:
What it does is simple: every five hundred milliseconds, your television captures a screenshot of what you are watching. Not a description. Not a genre tag. A pixel-level screenshot. Twice per second. It captures what is on your screen and sends it to Samsung’s servers. We match the screenshots against a database of known content. We know what you are watching, when you watch it, how long you watch, and when you stop. This works across everything connected to the television — streaming apps, cable boxes, gaming consoles, even a laptop plugged in by HDMI. We sell this information to advertising partners.
Twice every second. Let’s break down the math. If you watch 4 hours of TV each evening, that’s 28,800 screenshots per television each night. There are over 73 million Samsung Smart TVs in the United States. I won’t multiply it out — the number is huge and hard to grasp. But every screenshot is real. …
Fully disabling ACR and its associated data-sharing arrangements across all Smart TV services requires navigating four additional sub-agreements, each with its own disclosure screen and confirmation flow. The total click count, from the moment a user opens Settings to the moment ACR is fully disabled and all associated advertising data-sharing is revoked, is two hundred and six.
In our internal testing in Suwon, the fastest a user completed the full opt-out path was four minutes and twelve seconds. his user was a QA engineer who had memorized the route. She said it was “like a speedrun.” She was joking. No one else in the room laughed. I laughed, but later, at my desk, alone, where she could not hear me.
The second-fastest time was eleven minutes and forty-four seconds. This user opened every disclosure and attempted to read each one. She gave up on the third disclosure and began clicking without reading. She later described the experience as “hostile.”…
The average completion time in field testing was never recorded, because no field tester completed it. Zero.
Commenters:
Presumably though, this is one of the reasons why TVs are so cheap – they have additional revenue sources outside of the initial purchase? …
Connect it using HDMI to Apple TV or some other settop box and use it as a basic monitor only. …
People are entering their usernames, passwords, and card details while using the TV as a second monitor. …
Mandatory software update that contains a “bug” that makes accidentally reset it and turned it back on but also had another bug that makes it so when you toggle it off it shows off but is still on…oopsie.