The researchers have discovered that automatic content recognition (ACR) tracking is active most of the time, even when TVs are used as “dumb” HDMI devices. In other words, the TV manufacturers are monitoring your private moments as well. There’s apparently no monitoring of streaming content in the UK, but there is in the US.

The only good news is that these TVs can seemingly be configured to disable ACR, provided the owners know this activity is taking place and are able to find the right settings. (I recently looked at the configuration of our TVs again, and understanding the various settings was far from easy.)

  • smplEnglish
    17·
    13 hours ago

    Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) [42] is widely used for second-party tracking in smart TVs. As shown in Figure 1, ACR periodically captures frames (and/or audio), builds a fingerprint of the content, and then shares it with an ACR server for matching it against a database of known content (e.g., movies, ads, live feed). When the fingerprint matches, ACR server can determine exactly what piece of content is being watched on the smart TV.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203