- Avoiding tracking is challenging, with ACR often activated automatically.
Smart TV Tracking: If you think that only you are watching the smart TV installed in the house, then it is not so. The TV is also watching you. Yes, your smart TV has more information about what you watch. Swiss technology company Proton has said that modern smart TVs collect data of every information seen on the screen and it is shared with manufacturing, advertising and analytical companies. What is even more worrying is that it is becoming difficult to avoid this tracking.
How are you being tracked through smart TV?
Many modern smart TVs have a technology called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR). It not only tracks what you are streaming through apps but also keeps an eye on what is visible on the TV screen. That means, along with streaming service, it can also watch live television, games played on console and content from other external devices connected through HDMI. This technology creates a digital fingerprint of the content playing on the screen and then matches it with a large database to identify the content. This information is shared with TV manufacturing companies, advertisers and data brokers. ACR runs at the chipset level and is turned on by default. This means that even if you have not used all the features of the smart TV, this technology will still work.
Can this tracking be stopped?
Proton says that this tracking can be avoided, but it is not easy. The easiest way to do this is to keep your TV completely offline. In this way the TV will not be able to track you. Apart from this, if you want to avoid tracking even while using the internet, you will have to use tools that block TV telemetry and domain.
Can’t ACR be disabled?
You can turn off ACR and other tracking features of the TV, but it is very difficult to stop all types of data collection by doing so. Privacy settings are provided in many TV models, but they are made difficult to find by using confusing names or by other means. For this reason most people do not look here.
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