I learned some time ago that Smart TVs can spy on everything we do. Recently, a video by Naomi Brockwell reminded me of this issue, and I finally decided to take action.
Here is the research paper that details these findings:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3646547.3689013
Here’s a quick summary of the research findings:
Smart TVs use a tracking method called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) to create profiles of users’ viewing habits.
The researchers conducted a black-box audit of the ACR network traffic between ACR clients on smart TVs and ACR servers. Their findings, presented at the IMC 2024 conference, indicate that smart TVs, such as Samsung and LG, frequently transmit screenshots or audio to identify on-screen content, even when the TV is used as an external display (e.g., connected to a laptop via HDMI). This data is then sent to specific servers to build detailed user profiles.
The study also revealed that while users can opt-out of this data transmission through privacy settings, ACR is typically enabled by default. This research highlights the extensive data collection practices of smart TV platforms and opens new avenues for studying tracking capabilities in cloud-connected IoT devices.
The video suggests using a separate device for viewing content and disconnecting your TV from the Internet. Fortunately, this change is so seamless that the TV users in my home won’t even notice it.
Why?
Because we all use Apple TV. It’s an excellent device, and now it can help us stay more private. Of course, this assumes that we trust Apple not to do the same thing, but there is no evidence that they do.
I’ve disconnected our TV from WiFi since we never use the Internet directly on the TV. We continue to use everything through Apple TV, and according to the research, as long as we don’t reconnect the TV to WiFi, no data will be sent to external servers.
Privacy is normal.