Turning off tracking on a Samsung, Vizio or Roku smart TV does not stop the set from contacting the servers that tracking relies on, according to research from Northeastern University published on Monday.
The researchers wrote that TVs running operating systems from those three companies kept sending data to automatic content recognition (ACR) endpoints after users opted out in the settings. ACR captures video screenshots or audio clips from the TV and sends them to remote servers, where the data is used for measuring viewership and serving targeted ads. The paper, "Watching the Watchers: Privacy Analysis of US Smart TV Automatic Content Recognition," points to potential privacy violations by some of the biggest TV brands.
The study was broad. It covered eight smart TV operating systems across 12 TVs from 10 manufacturers: Amazon, Hisense, LG, Roku, Samsung, Sony, Supersonic, TCL, Vizio, and Westinghouse. The goal was to learn when TVs use ACR and how well opting out works.
The summary of the research does not describe what the traffic contained, and that gap matters. A connection to an ACR endpoint is not the same as a screenshot being collected and used to target ads. Still, an opt-out switch is presented to viewers as a promise, and network traffic is one of the few places that promise can be checked from outside the company. If a toggle changes the menu but not the connection, it is hard to call it a control.
The open question is the rest of the field. Samsung, Vizio and Roku are the platforms singled out, but the study spans eight operating systems, and the summary does not say how the others behaved.