This is an opinion piece. The views are the author’s own.
When you buy a toaster, you get a toaster. When you buy a smart TV, you get a screen, a remote and, quite possibly, a quiet little observer that keeps track of everything you watch on it.
That observer has a name: automatic content recognition, or ACR. And I think it’s time we stopped accepting it as the default.
What Your TV Is Doing
According to Consumer Reports, ACR tries to identify every show you play on the set, whether it comes from cable, an antenna, a streaming app or a disc. That information goes back to the TV maker, a business partner or both, and privacy policies allow it to be shared with many other companies. It can power recommendations, sure. It can also power ad targeting and marketing, and once it’s out there, it’s hard to review or delete.
How detailed can it get? When Texas’s attorney general sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL in December 2025, the state alleged that the software can capture what’s on screen as often as every 500 milliseconds. Those are allegations, not findings. But even the less dramatic version, a running log of your viewing habits, is more than most people would knowingly hand over.
We’ve Been Here Before
This isn’t new. In 2017, Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle charges from the FTC and New Jersey that it had collected second-by-second viewing histories from about 11 million smart TVs without people’s knowledge or consent. According to the complaint, the company linked that data to household details such as age, income and education and sold it to third parties, including for targeted advertising. A separate $17 million class-action settlement followed.
Notice what the regulators asked for back then: prominent disclosure, kept separate from the privacy policy, and affirmative express consent before collecting the data. In other words, the fix was opt-in. Consumer Reports, which first reported on ACR in 2015, has been telling readers how to turn it off ever since.
Nearly a decade later, the basic setup hasn’t changed much. The tracking is usually on unless you go looking for it, and the switches are hidden behind names that seem designed to put you to sleep. Consumer Reports’ guide to turning it off lists settings such as “Viewing Information Services,” “Live Plus,” “Smart Interactivity” and “Use Information for TV Inputs.” Nobody setting up a new TV on a Saturday afternoon is going to decode those.
Even then, switching off ACR doesn’t necessarily stop all data collection. Consumer Reports says the only sure way is to keep the TV off the internet entirely, which defeats the point of a smart TV.
Opt-In Is Clearly Possible
Here’s what bothers me most. We now have proof that asking first is perfectly doable.
As part of settlements with Texas this year, Samsung agreed in February not to collect or monetize ACR data from Texas users without their “express prior consent,” and to make that request prominent during setup. LG agreed to a similar opt-in model in May, with a pop-up disclosure explaining what’s collected and a simple way to opt out later.
These deals don’t include fines, and they only cover Texas. But they show what a reasonable version of this technology looks like: you’re told what happens, and you decide.
So the engineering problem is solved. The screen that asks for permission exists. The only question is why it should depend on which state your living room happens to be in.
What I’d Like to See
My ask is simple. Viewing-data collection should be off until you turn it on, everywhere, on every brand. The setup screen should say in plain English what is collected, who gets it and what you get in return. And saying no shouldn’t break the TV.
If the data really makes the product better, companies should be able to make that case to customers directly. Plenty of people might happily trade their viewing history for better recommendations or a cheaper set. That’s their call to make, with eyes open.
What I object to is the current deal, where the trade is made for you and the only way to undo it is a scavenger hunt through the settings menu. A TV is supposed to be something you watch. It shouldn’t be watching back unless you’ve said yes.
In the meantime, if you own a smart TV, spend 10 minutes in its privacy settings this weekend. It’s the most useful thing you’ll do with that remote all month.
More on Contoh
- My Oven Does Not Need to Talk to My Phone
- Autoplay Should Be Opt-In, for Everyone
- Every Gadget Should Come With a Software Expiration Date on the Box
Sources
- Consumer Reports (via Yahoo News): How to turn off smart TV snooping features
- TechSpot: Texas sues five smart TV makers over ACR claims
- IAPP: Automated content recognition technology takes privacy enforcement spotlight
- Secure Privacy: Samsung and LG Texas ACR settlements
- Vorys: Smart TV manufacturer to pay $2.2 million to settle FTC data privacy suit