I was raised to believe a television was a box you watched. It turns out I had the arrangement backwards.
Researchers at UC Davis, University College London, and a university in Madrid sat down and did the plain, unglamorous work of watching what a smart TV sends out over the wire while you watch it. They published their findings at a computer science conference in 2024, and the finding was this: the set doesn’t much care what you plug into it. Hook up a laptop, a game console, a cable box, doesn’t matter. The TV keeps sampling the screen and phoning a report home regardless, a technology the industry calls Automatic Content Recognition, which is a genteel name for a guard standing at the door writing down everyone who comes and goes, including the ones who never agreed to be counted. One of the researchers, Dr. Anna Maria Mandalari of UCL, put it plainly enough: the average person has no idea what ACR is, let alone that there’s a way to turn it off.
There usually is a way to turn it off. It is usually buried three or four menus deep, under a label chosen by a committee that understood exactly how off-putting the word “tracking” would be. Samsung calls it “Viewing Information Services.” Vizio called it “Smart Interactivity” until the FTC made them stop pretending it was a feature and admit it was surveillance — a $2.2 million fine in 2017, for gathering the viewing habits of eleven million television sets that had already been sold, delivered by a software update nobody asked for.
Here is the part worth sitting with. Vizio’s advertising and data business brought in more money in 2023 than the televisions themselves did. LG’s was not far behind. Which tells you plainly what the set is actually for. You did not buy a television. You bought a very large, very convenient sensor, and agreed, somewhere inside forty pages of terms you did not read, to let it work for somebody else.
Texas sued five of the biggest manufacturers over this in December of last year. Court filings from that case put Samsung’s screen-capturing at roughly twice a second, not once a minute, not once every fifteen, closer to constant than casual. By February, Samsung had settled, agreeing to stop collecting that data without asking first and to put the disclosure where a person might actually see it. LG followed in May. Nobody paid a fine. The machine simply agreed, going forward, to ask permission before it watches you watch it.
I don’t say any of this to make a man afraid of his own living room. I say it because the fix is fifteen minutes and does not require a lawyer, a lobbyist, or an act of Congress, just a trip through the settings menu, which is more than most of us can say for the other things quietly collecting us these days.
Next time: how to turn it off, brand by brand.