27/08/2026
Is Your SMART TV Spying on YOU?
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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. That content belongs to somebody else, and somebody else's property gets protected.
Your living room is not.
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.
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. A supermarket chain paid billions for a television maker to get at what people watch.
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.
Here is how to disable ACR tracking on the major brands:
→ Samsung: Settings > All Settings > General & Privacy > Terms & Privacy > Viewing Information Services
→ LG: Home > Settings > Accessibility > Support > Privacy & Terms > User Agreements, and untick Viewing Information Agreement
→ Vizio: All Settings > Privacy & Legal > Viewing Data
→ Roku: Settings > Privacy > Smart TV Experience > Use Info from TV Inputs
→ Sony: Settings > System > About > Legal Information > Samba Interactive TV
The researchers turned the setting off and watched the ACR servers go completely silent. Not less traffic. None.
Turning ACR off does not stop everything. Roku's own policy says that if the feature was on and it gets switched off, what was already collected stays and can still be shared with third parties. Off means off from now on. It does not undo what came before.
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.
→ https://lnkd.in/e5gjFXSj
Research & writing: Jolanda de Koff
Sharing is fine. Copying without credit is not
Read the full breakdown:
→ https://lnkd.in/e2ZUQpk8
