A Study Says Your TV Keeps Phoning Home After You Tell It Not To

Researchers at Northeastern University looked at what smart TVs do once you turn off content tracking in the privacy menu, and found suspicious network traffic still leaving sets from Samsung, Vizio and Roku. The feature in question is ACR, automatic content recognition, which works out what is on your screen and reports it back.

Two things before anyone throws a television out of a window.

This is one study, reported by one outlet, and I could not find a second newsroom that had checked it independently. Worth knowing, not worth dismissing: the researchers looked at a dozen sets across ten manufacturers, which is real work rather than a tweet.

More interesting, earlier academic work pointed the other way. A 2024 study of Samsung and LG sets found that opting out did stop the traffic to the tracking servers. So either something changed, or the behaviour varies by model and by menu, and both of those are worth more scrutiny than a headline allows. If you want to be precise about it, the honest summary is that opting out works on some sets and may not on others, and you cannot tell which one you own from the sofa.

Does it change what I do? No, and that is not me being brave. I start from the assumption that everything in the house with a microphone or a network connection is listening and collecting, and I decide what to put in front of it on that basis. A study confirming it on televisions confirms the position, it does not alter it.

Where it does change something is the next purchase. If I am choosing between sets and one of them has a reputation for being less invasive, that goes in the column with price and panel quality. Not above them, but in there.

For anyone who wants to do something today without rewiring the house: the cheapest move is not giving the television the internet at all. Plug a streaming box into it, let that do the smart part, and the panel goes back to being a panel. It is less convenient. It is also the only approach where you are not relying on a menu toggle doing what it says.