Northeastern University study claims smart TVs ignore privacy opt-out requests

A study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University involving 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial smart TV devices suggests that many manufacturers fail to honor consumer privacy requests to opt out of Automatic Content Recognition (ACR).

ACR technology captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content to build personalized viewer profiles for monetization. While manufacturers claim users can opt out of this tracking, the study found that the choice is often ineffective. For instance, on Vizio SmartCast, traffic to a content-correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continued in 100% of opted-out scenarios. Similarly, Samsung Tizen showed persistent ACR-consistent traffic in more than 60% of evaluated cases.

The researchers noted that while they cannot inspect encrypted payloads to confirm if specific data collection violates FTC agreements, the opt-out settings frequently had no observable effect on data traffic.