Study: Smart TVs Still Report Data Even When Content Recognition Is Turned Off
A U.S. study tested 12 smart TVs from 10 manufacturers across 5,943 controlled experiments on Automatic Content Recognition (ACR). It found that some models still reported content-related traffic after ACR was disabled in settings, and two platforms transmitted viewing data unencrypted. VIDAA OS sent plaintext data via MQTT, including non-resettable device IDs and audio fingerprints; Vizio's WatchFree+ wrote program names into unencrypted domain name queries, which users could not disable.
Study: Smart TVs Still Report Data Even After Content Recognition Is Disabled
A study on Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) in U.S. smart TVs tested 12 televisions from 10 manufacturers, conducting 5,943 controlled experiments. It found that some models continued to report content-related traffic even after ACR was disabled in the settings, and that viewing content from two platforms was transmitted in an unencrypted form.
Data from VIDAA OS was sent in plaintext via MQTT, including a non-resettable device ID and audio fingerprint. Meanwhile, Vizio's WatchFree+ wrote program names into unencrypted domain name lookups, and users could not disable this feature.
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