Your Smart TV is spying on you, and most people don't know. But YOU will!

Your Samsung television takes a screenshot of its own screen every 500 milliseconds. Two per second, all day, bundled up and sent out of the house. LG does the same job through the sound instead. That is the set working exactly as designed. It is called ACR, it came with the television, and setup switched it on.

Plug in a games console and it keeps reading. Connect a laptop to the HDMI port and it keeps reading. Watch normal broadcast television and it keeps reading.

→ Playing PlayStation? Read. → Watching cable TV? Read. → Using Chromecast or Fire Stick? Read.

One thing does get left alone. Researchers who measured the network traffic of Samsung and LG sets found no ACR traffic at all while Netflix and YouTube were streaming. They could not say for certain why, and put copyright at the top of the list. That content belongs to somebody else, and somebody else’s property gets protected.

Your living room is not.

What is ACR?

ACR stands for Automatic Content Recognition. The set takes a sample of what is playing, turns it into a fingerprint, and matches that fingerprint against a library to work out what it is.

The two biggest brands do it in different ways, and both describe it themselves. Samsung’s advertising division wrote it down in a guide for advertisers: screenshots of the screen every 500 milliseconds, converted into unique patterns, compared against a matching library. LG works through the audio instead. Its advertising arm takes samples of the sound, about 10 milliseconds each, one hundredth of a second. Those samples get hashed into audio signatures on the set itself and sent off to be matched.

It does not care where the picture came from. The set has no idea whether it is showing a Blu-ray player, a games console, a laptop on HDMI or a cable box. A picture and a sound come in, and both get read.

You never agreed to this, right?

Wrong. The agreement happened during setup, on the screen with the wall of text and the “I Agree” button underneath it. That is the moment a television turns into a measuring instrument for the advertising industry.

The wording on that screen does its own job. Samsung calls it Viewing Information Services. LG calls it the Viewing Information Agreement, or Live Plus on an older set. Vizio calls it Viewing Data. Three names that sound like a feature, for one system that reads the screen twice a second and reports what it finds.

The Data They’re Collecting Right Now

This is what ends up in the profile:

→ What plays on the screen (shows, movies, apps, games)
→ How long it plays
→ Which devices are plugged into the HDMI ports
→ Viewing patterns and habits
→ The advertising profile built out of all of it

That data goes to advertisers who use it to target across devices. Something plays on the television, and an hour later an ad for it shows up on the phone. That is not coincidence. That is the set reporting what was on.

Manufacturers differ in how openly they say it, and in what they do with it afterwards. The starting point is the same everywhere: viewing habits are worth money.

The Microphone Is the Part That Stayed

Televisions with built-in cameras were a thing between roughly 2012 and 2016. Samsung and LG put them in their flagship sets for video calling and gesture control, the feature never caught on, and it disappeared. Almost nothing sold today has a camera in it.

The microphone stayed. Voice control needs one, and it sits either in the set or in the remote.

The “fake-off” story comes from that microphone, and the documents behind it are public. In the Vault 7 files there is a tool called Weeping Angel, aimed at the Samsung F8000 series, with engineering notes from a joint workshop with MI5 in June 2014. It put the television into a state where the screen looked switched off while the microphone kept recording the room.

The interesting part of those notes is the list of things that did not work. The blue LED on the back stayed lit in Fake-Off mode, and the notes file that under limitations, not under solved. WiFi was switched off in that mode, so the recordings had nowhere to go, and getting it to stay on was still on the to-do list. The audio went onto the television itself, up to 700 megabytes of it, and somebody had to come back and collect it. Streaming the audio out live was a wish, not a feature. So was video. Installing the thing took a USB stick, and firmware version 1118 killed that method.

That is a spy agency with a person standing in the living room, working on one television model with three firmware versions.

Their Business Model: Your Privacy for Sale

In 2017, Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle charges from the FTC and the New Jersey Attorney General. The software on its televisions had collected viewing data from 11 million sets without the owners knowing. A million and a half went to the FTC, a million to New Jersey, and 300,000 of that was suspended. The settlement did not stop the practice. It made the companies write it down instead.

The privacy policies now say it out loud. Vizio licenses Viewing Data to advertisers, ad agencies, analytics companies and other ad tech firms. Data brokers add demographics, smartphone location, web history and purchase history on top of it.

Translation: We’re selling your data. Not our problem what they do with it.

The manufacturers are equally clear about where their responsibility ends. Apps and content providers on the set collect their own data about the device and what happens on it, and Samsung’s SmartTV supplement handles that in one line: “Samsung is not responsible for these providers’ privacy or security practices.”

In December 2024, Walmart closed a 2.3 billion dollar deal for Vizio. Walmart’s own announcement put the reason plainly: it wanted Vizio’s SmartCast operating system and the advertising business running on top of it, across more than 19 million active accounts. That advertising business runs on the ACR data described above. A supermarket chain paid billions for a television maker to get at what people watch.

The same announcement says where Vizio’s money comes from. The segment that is mostly the advertising business now accounts for all of the company’s gross profit, not most of it but all of it. The televisions themselves bring in nothing.

Since that deal closed there is a new setting on those sets, and Vizio has a page explaining it. Switch it on and what plays on the screen gets linked to the Walmart account signed in on the device. It is used to send promotions inside Walmart stores, on their website and in their app. The same data goes to Walmart Connect, their advertising network, to advertisers, to companies that measure ads, and to Sam’s Club.

Switch it off and Vizio says limited disclosure to Walmart may continue anyway, for audience measurement and reporting on how ads performed.

I ran Wireshark on a friend’s Smart TV once. The amount of tracking domains it contacted was insane. Over 40 requests per minute. Just sitting idle.

This is one of the reasons I don’t have a TV or Smart TV.

How to Stop It

None of this has to be accepted. Here is how to disable ACR tracking on the major brands:

→ Samsung: Settings > All Settings > General & Privacy > Terms & Privacy > Viewing Information Services (turn OFF)

→ LG: Home > Settings > Accessibility > Support > Privacy & Terms > User Agreements, and untick Viewing Information Agreement. On older sets the same switch is called Live Plus, under General > System > Additional Settings

→ Vizio: All Settings > Privacy & Legal > Viewing Data (turn OFF). On older sets it sits under All Settings > Admin & Privacy > Viewing Data

→ Roku: Settings > Privacy > Smart TV Experience > Use Info from TV Inputs (turn OFF)

→ Sony: Settings > System > About > Legal Information > Samba Interactive TV (turn OFF)

Samsung does not publish those steps at all. Their support page says to go to the settings menu and adjust the preferences there, and leaves it at that. LG documents the setting, on a page written for a webOS version that is years old. The paths shift between model years and firmware versions too, so look for terms like “Viewing Information Services,” “Smart Interactivity,” or “Viewing Data” in the privacy or terms sections. On LG sets the Live Plus toggle has moved more than once; the settings menu has a search box, and typing the name finds it.

The good news is that this switch does what it says. The researchers who measured Samsung and LG traffic turned the setting off and watched the ACR servers go completely silent. Not less traffic. None.

Also disable the microphone and any camera in the privacy settings. And if there is a lens, tape works. Low tech, but effective.

Then check the result, because a menu says what it promises and a network shows what happens. The router lists the connections the television makes. Look at that list before and after flipping the switch and it becomes obvious which one is telling the truth.

Turning ACR off does not stop everything, and the manufacturers write that down themselves. Vizio says that switching off Viewing Data does not stop the set from collecting Activity Data, which is what it uses to recommend content. To stop that one the television has to be reset to factory settings. Roku is just as clear about it: if the feature was on and it gets switched off, what was already collected stays with Roku and can still be shared with third parties. Off means off from now on. It does not undo what came before.

The version that stops all of it is blunt: keep the television off the WiFi entirely and run everything through a separate box that can be replaced when it starts misbehaving. A screen with no network connection has nowhere to send anything.

And when a new set comes into the house, the setup wizard is the moment that decides all of this. Those screens are designed to be clicked through. Read them once, uncheck the viewing data box, and none of the rest is needed.

What This Means for You

Most of the people reading this have no idea it is happening in their own living room right now.

But you do.

A Smart TV is not a screen. It is a data collection device that happens to show video, and the smart features it was bought for come with a measurement system attached.

That can be changed. Disable ACR tracking. Turn off microphones and cameras that are not being used. Read the setup screens before agreeing to them. Use the television as a display and run the streaming through hardware that can be swapped out.

Your Smart TV knows more than you imagined!

Want to see it happen on your own network? The router lists the connections that television makes, and reading that list is a skill.

My Ethical Hacking Complete Course Zero to Expert takes you there step by step: reconnaissance, scanning, exploitation and traffic analysis, hands-on, from your first day with no Linux or hacking background.

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Hacking is not a hobby but a way of life.