Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has charged five major television manufacturers with illegally collecting user data using automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to record what owners watch.
The charges concern Sony , Samsung and LG as well as Chinese manufacturers Hisense and TCL Technology Group Corporation.
The Attorney General’s Office specifically highlighted “serious concerns” about Chinese companies, required to comply with China’s national security law, potentially allowing the Chinese government access to American user data.
According to lawsuits filed in Texas courts, TV manufacturers use ACR technology to capture screenshots every 500 milliseconds. This technology tracks user activity in real time and transmits the collected information to the companies’ servers (without the knowledge or consent of device owners). The collected information is then sold to companies that pay the most for targeted advertising.
“Companies, especially those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, have no right to illegally record Americans’ devices in their homes,” Paxton said . “Such actions are an invasion of privacy, deceptive, and illegal. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas, because owning a television set does not mean handing over personal information to tech giants or foreign adversaries.”
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time smart TV manufacturers have been accused of spying on users.
For example, in 2017, TV maker Vizio (owned by Walmart) paid $2.2 million to settle charges brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General’s office.
It was later revealed that Vizio had collected viewing data from 11 million devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent through its Smart Interactivity feature. Since February 2014, Vizio and a related company had been releasing “smart TVs” (and remotely updating older models with the necessary software) that recorded detailed information about the content viewed.
The collected data was linked to demographic information such as users’ gender, age, income, and education and then sold to third parties to display targeted advertising.
Furthermore, in 2024, a group of researchers had already accused smart TV manufacturers (including Samsung and LG) of using the aforementioned automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, similar to Shazam.
According to a report by researchers at University College London, the University of California, Davis, and the Carlos III University of Madrid, the tracking system also works when TVs are used as external displays , that is, when they are connected to other devices via HDMI. This way, ACR can intercept content from game consoles or laptops connected to the TV.
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