You switched off ACR on your Samsung TV. The TV may not have gotten the message. That’s the uncomfortable takeaway from new research that found traffic consistent with automated content recognition still leaving the sets with the feature disabled.
First, the basics. ACR is the tech that effectively screenshots what’s on your screen so it can be matched against a database and used to serve ads. It’s been on by default across much of the smart TV industry. Samsung is hardly alone, but it is big: roughly 34% of US smart TVs, according to SamMobile, which reported on the findings.
This isn’t Samsung’s first run-in over the practice. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the company, and the two later signed an agreement. Under it, Samsung Electronics can’t collect ACR data unless users are fully informed and consent. That’s the promise. The new tests suggest the behavior on the wire doesn’t clearly match it.
The researchers ran repeated tests with ACR disabled and watched network traffic. They saw ACR-like transmissions in all 30 tests on Samsung’s own streaming service. They also saw them in 41 of 60 antenna tests, 18 of 30 HDMI tests, and six of 30 Tubi tests. HDMI matters here because that’s where your game console, Blu-ray player or laptop connects. Antenna matters because it’s supposedly just a free over-the-air broadcast.
Now the caveat, and it’s a big one. The traffic was encrypted, so the researchers couldn’t confirm what was being sent. Samsung will likely point to that gap, and it’s a fair limit on what the study proves. But it cuts both ways. If a TV is phoning home in patterns that look like ACR after you’ve said no, the burden should be on the manufacturer to explain what those packets are. Users can’t inspect them. Regulators barely can either.
That’s the real problem with consent toggles on closed devices. You’re trusting a menu setting you can’t verify, on hardware you can’t audit, from a company whose revenue model rewards data collection. Smart TVs have become ad platforms that happen to show television, and the screen is one of the most revealing data sources in your home.
What should you do? Disabling ACR is still worth doing, but don’t treat it as a guarantee. If you care about this, block the TV’s network access, use a separate streaming box you trust, or filter DNS at the router level. Not pretty, but it’s the only control you actually hold.
The bigger test is whether Texas, or anyone else, checks the traffic. An agreement is only as good as its enforcement, and so far the evidence suggests that part is still missing.