What your smart TV knows about you

Most of us think of a TV as something we look at. A modern smart TV also looks back. Not with a camera, but with software that studies what’s on the screen, works out what you’re watching, and reports it to the company that made the TV.

The industry calls this automatic content recognition, or ACR. Samsung calls its version Viewing Information Services; LG’s recent TVs call it Viewing Information. The names are friendly. What they do is worth understanding.

How ACR works, in plain terms

Every so often, the TV takes a small sample of what’s on screen, turns it into a compact “fingerprint”, and compares it with a database of known shows, films and adverts. If there’s a match, the TV now knows what you were watching, on which channel or app, and when.

It happens a lot. In 2024, researchers from University College London, UC Davis and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid tested Samsung and LG TVs in the UK and the US. Citing the makers’ own documentation, their paper notes that LG captures frames every 10 milliseconds and Samsung every 500 milliseconds. On the network, the LG sets they measured contacted ACR servers roughly every 15 seconds; for Samsung, the researchers estimate fingerprints went out about once a minute.

It isn’t only about streaming apps

The part that surprises most people: ACR doesn’t care where the picture comes from. In the study, the TVs produced ACR traffic while watching ordinary antenna TV and while showing something plugged in over HDMI, including when the TV was simply being used as a monitor. A games console, a laptop, a cable box: if it’s on the screen, the TV can try to recognize it.

Why TV makers want this

Viewing data is valuable because it’s precise. Knowing which household watched which ad, and what they watched before and after, is exactly what advertisers pay for.

Regulators have taken notice. In 2017, Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million to the US Federal Trade Commission and the State of New Jersey. The FTC said Vizio TVs had collected second-by-second viewing data from around 11 million TVs without telling owners clearly, and sold it to third parties. In December 2025, the Texas Attorney General sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL over ACR, alleging it could capture screenshots of a TV’s display every 500 milliseconds without users’ knowledge. Samsung reached an agreement with Texas in February 2026 to stop collecting ACR data from Texans without their express consent.

Tech reviewers have been loud about it too. Linus Tech Tips put it bluntly in the description of its August 2026 video, “How to Stop Smart TV Spying”: “Is your smart TV watching you right back?”

The good news: switching it off works

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough. In the 2024 study, when the researchers opted out of ACR in the TV’s settings, the communication with ACR servers stopped completely. Not reduced. Stopped. Being signed into an account or not made no real difference either way.

Samsung’s own support page says the same thing from the other side: ACR only runs if you agreed to Viewing Information Services, and you can change that in the settings.

So the problem isn’t that the off switch is fake. It’s that most people don’t know it exists, agreed to it once during setup, and would need to dig through several menus to find it again. Menus differ by brand, model year and region, and the settings for ads are often separate from the settings for viewing data.

What to do about it

• Find your TV’s viewing-data setting and switch it off. On Samsung it’s Viewing Information Services; on recent LG TVs, Viewing Information; on Vizio, Viewing Data.
• Switch off ad personalization separately. It’s usually a different consent.
• Check again after a reset or a major update. It takes a minute and it’s worth knowing where you stand.

We’ve written a step-by-step guide for Samsung TVs, and Consumer Reports keeps a good list of menu paths for other brands. If you’d rather not hunt through menus yourself, that’s what our app is for.

One honest caveat: switching off ACR reduces what your TV collects about what you watch. It doesn’t make a smart TV fully private, and it won’t remove every ad. It is still one of the most useful things you can do.