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- Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) sends viewing data from your smart TV to third parties.
- Vizio and Samsung TVs both appeared to send this data even when researchers opted out of ACR.
- Only four out of eight smart TVs appeared to completely honor ACR opt-out.
If you thought that opting out of surveillance on your smart TV would give you your privacy back, think again.
A study by researchers at Northeastern University found that some smart TVs still seem to send information about what youโre watching to third parties, even after you pressed the opt-out button.
The study, โWatching the watchersโ, tested twelve smart TVs from ten manufacturers to find out how well they respected opt-outs from automatic content recognition (ACR). ACR is a TV feature that captures audio and/or video content from smart TVs and uploads it to a third party (typically the TV manufacturer).
The third party converts this content into digital fingerprints to understand what youโre watching, and can then use it to send targeted advertising or allow others to do the same. Itโs on most if not all smart TVs, and 82% of US households had a smart TV as of last year.
The test took in the eight operating systems behind roughly 95% of US smart TVs, and ran ten viewing scenarios on each of them. These ranged from viewing antenna TV through to viewing via screen mirroring from another device. The researchers tested viewing the first-party streaming services provided free with the manufacturersโ operating systems, along with sessions using third-party streaming apps. And they tested sessions where the TV was connected to another device via its HDMI port.
The study ran all of its tests both with ACR left on, and with the opt-out setting selected. The whole test involved over 5,000 automated sessions.
Vizio continued to send 100% of what looked like traffic when viewing its first-party streaming services and antenna-based TV services,…