Smart TVs implement a unique tracking approach called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) to profile viewing activity of their users. ACR is a Shazam-like technology that works by periodically capturing the content displayed on a TV’s screen and matching it against a content library to detect what content is being displayed at any given point in time.
We perform a series of experiments on two major smart TV platforms: Samsung and LG. Our results show that ACR works even when the smart TV is used as a “dumb” external display, opting-out stops network traffic to ACR servers, and there are differences in how ACR works across the UK and the US.
Seems like you can opt out at least, or of course you can just not connect it to the Internet in the first place.
I really wish there was some clean, free software option for Smart TVs. Something like GrapheneOS or LineageOS but for TVs. Of course it can’t be 100% free, it would still have to support Digital Restrictions Management so people can watch their Netflix and so on.
I will always be very annoyed by the fact that consumers demanded “smart TVs” instead of just shelling out for a decent Kodi/Android/Apple TV box the way god intended.
Copyright doesn’t matter if you’re a big company, it only matters if you are an end-user or a non-profit library
On a serious note, one important part of the paper is this (emphasis mine):
As shown in Figure 1, ACR periodically captures frames (and/or audio), builds a fingerprint of the content, and then shares it with an ACR server for matching it against a database of known content (e.g., movies, ads, live feed)
The screenshots themselves are never transmitted (which makes sense because reverse streaming would cause insane bandwidth problems), so this is not a privacy concern if the content’s hash/fingerprint isn’t in their database.
Of course most video content probably is in their database, so the privacy risk to average TV users is very significant, but at least this mechanism isn’t going to leak screenshots of your computer desktop you have plugged in to your TV, Microsoft Recall-style.
This is one of the reasons I haven’t bought a TV at my place. I can not find a dumb TV anymore, and I for sure am not willing to buy a smart TV. Since I already have an ultra wide monitor, I just stopped looking for a TV and settled with this.
I don’t even watch TV at all, the family does. I am sure it will run for a long time like 10 years and in case of switch as I said. Furthermore, I will use a UHD monitor. But maybe I will think that at then time, who knows if they bring AI inside monitor just to charge us something and suck the money out of us like HP has introduced now in their printers.
I use an LG C4 OLED as my PC monitor, but the first thing I did with it was connected it to my IOT VLAN, gave it a static IP and blocked it at the firewall from reaching the internet. That way it won’t “magically connect to an open network” to send all it’s junk out, also turned off all the ad stuff you can from the menus, not that I think that does anything other than give you a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Nowadays, it seems that the logical option is to get one of those TVs, never connect them to your network (make firmware updates via USB) and connect an Apple Box since the Android boxes are all Google invasive. Not that Apple isn’t but you know what I mean.
The easiest thing is to just buy or use an old laptop and connect it with HDMI. I don’t see any reason to buy a box or use cable when you can do the most with just an old laptop. Then you can have all the benefits of running an OS of your choice and such as well.
It was in the news recently that smart TV manufacturers now make more money via the ads displayed on the devices than by selling the devices themselves.
