Your Smart TV Is Spying on You With Three Letters You’ve Never Even Heard Of
At this point, you’re probably pretty used to the idea of your smartphone tracking what you do and sharing that information with various companies. It’s a bit depressing, but it’s become a reality. But what about your TV?
Somehow the idea of your TV watching what you’re doing and sending information back to the base doesn’t sit as well with me, and I suspect you do too. What if I told you there was technology that monitors everything you watch and then uses that information? I’m not just talking about Netflix or other streaming services, taking note of your favorite movies. No, I’m talking about your TV itself, which is watching All you put on the screen. This is called ACR or Automatic Content Recognition.
What the ACR actually does
Let’s say you connect a Blu-ray player to your TV and start playing a movie from your collection. How would your TV know what movie you are watching? This is where ACR works its black magic. It basically works like a video version of Shazam, the service that can identify what song is playing wherever you can hear it.
ACR takes the picture and sound data fed into the TV and compares it to a database of known media. This means that your TV can know what you are watching at any time. The key detail is that ACR doesn’t just track what you stream through a TV app: it works on every input. Are you watching a DVD? Do you play on your PlayStation? If the image reaches the screen, ACR can save it.
How TV Manufacturers Use ACR Data
TV manufacturers claim that this data is used to your advantage. The goal is to make smarter content recommendations and fine-tune picture settings, but it’s also the backbone of a lucrative advertising ecosystem that thrives on knowing your exact viewing habits.
Once this data is captured, it is transmitted in anonymized form to the TV manufacturer and its advertising technology partners. This allows these entities to create detailed profiles of your viewing habits and perhaps products that may be of interest to you. This can be used to show you personalized advertisements on your TV, for example.
This is not a conspiracy theory; it is a documented economic model. Roku’s advertising materials claim that its platform allows advertisers to reach audiences based on their TV viewing behavior. Vizio was fined by the FTC in 2017 for secretly collecting viewing data from millions of smart TVs and selling it to third parties. And while companies have become more transparent since then, the fundamental model hasn’t changed: ACR turns your TV into a data-gathering sensor in your living room.
The Privacy Problem (and Why It’s Hard to Avoid)
The problem is not so much the existence of the ACR as the way in which it is deployed. Did you know the ACR existed before reading this article? Well, when you first set up your smart TV, like most people, you probably didn’t read the privacy agreement, and that’s when you opted for ACR. If you knew ACR could monitor Nothing you plug in your television, would you still have said yes?
Initial setup screens often use vague language like “Enable data display to improve recommendations,” without making it clear that you agree to constant monitoring of content. Is this legal? Barely. Should I like it? No!
You may be viewing private or sensitive content that you would never want to share, even if it were “anonymized.” I sometimes use my TV as a monitor and I have information about a private company on this screen. Even if I had complete confidence in the operation of ACR as they say, it’s the principle that bothers me. That’s before we get into all the many examples of data breaches committed by hackers that we’ve seen over the years.
And it’s not just a television problem. Streaming boxes like Roku and Amazon Fire TV use similar telemetry and ad tracking systems, meaning that even if you avoid Smart TV apps, you’re still profiled. Although, at least in these cases, the monitoring is limited to what you watch on the box itself.
How to regain control
The good news is that you can go to your smart TV right now and turn off ACR. I can’t give you a detailed guide for each brand of TV, nor can I verify that the online instructions are correct, but it’s almost always found under the “Privacy” segment of your TV’s settings. Here it might be called “Use Info for TV Inputs” or “AI Recommendations,” or something like that. All you need to do is turn off any type of information sharing option and you can search online for the specific ACR settings for your TV model.
If you really want to go nuclear, factory reset your smart TV and then don’t connect it to an internet connection at all. If it doesn’t have your Wi-Fi password or an Ethernet connection, ACR cannot work.
Instead, use a streaming box like Apple TV. Apple has been pretty good at strict privacy measures, and again, any streaming box you use at least limits tracking to what you stream on the box and not anything you connect or view on the TV as a whole.
- Brand
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Apple
- Operating system
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tvOS
- Resolution
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4K
- Ports
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HDMI
