Smart TVs screenshot screens for ACR tracking; Samsung and LG settle with Texas AG

What the audit found

Researchers at UC Davis, University College London and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid audited the network traffic leaving Samsung and LG smart TVs and published the results at the 2024 ACM Internet Measurement Conference in a paper titled "Watching TV with the Second-Party." As a dev.to write-up of the work explains, the subject was Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR: the television periodically samples what is displayed on screen or audible through its speakers and matches those samples against a content database to determine what is being watched — the video equivalent of a music-recognition app.

Two results stand out. First, ACR ran regardless of where the picture originated: a live broadcast, one of the set's own streaming apps, or an external device attached over HDMI. Using the TV purely as an external monitor made no difference; a laptop or game console feeding the screen was captured just the same. Second, the data went home on a steady schedule. According to the measurements reported by dev.to, Samsung TVs contacted company servers roughly once a minute, while LG sets did so about every 15 seconds.

The study also tested the controls around the feature. Opting out meant working through several separate advertising and tracking toggles spread across different menus, with no single switch that disabled everything. And when the researchers exercised their rights under privacy law to request the data companies held about them, the responses came back vague and did not correspond to the volume of traffic the audit had actually observed.

Regulators move on the same issue

According to the dev.to summary, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five major manufacturers — Samsung, Sony, LG, Hisense and TCL — in December 2025, alleging that ACR grabs a screenshot of whatever is on the display every 500 milliseconds. Samsung settled in February 2026, agreeing to stop collecting ACR data without a user's informed consent and to add clear disclosure screens. LG reached a similar settlement in May 2026. The cases against the remaining three manufacturers are still open.

One distinction is worth keeping straight: the academic audit measured how often data was transmitted to company servers — in the range of every 15 to 60 seconds depending on the brand — while the half-second figure is the capture rate alleged in the Texas complaint.

What owners can do

The dev.to post offers practical guidance for anyone wanting the collection to stop. Search the settings menu for labels such as "viewing data" or "interest-based advertising," and for the manufacturer's own name for the feature — LG calls its version "Live Plus" — and disable each one individually, since a lone master toggle is rarely sufficient. A blunter option, where the setup allows it, is to connect devices only over HDMI and never link the TV to the internet or its built-in apps. The dev.to write-up notes that in that configuration the tracking machinery may still run locally, but it has nowhere to send what it gathers.

Because settlement terms and opt-out flows differ between brands and are still shifting as more state actions play out, checking the current privacy settings for your specific model is a safer bet than assuming one manufacturer's rules carry over to another.

Why it matters

ACR is unusual because it sits at the device level, below any individual app or service. The tracking most people are familiar with is bounded by context — a website or an app sees what happens inside it. A screen-level sampler instead observes everything the display shows, including a work laptop attached for a presentation or a console gaming session that has nothing to do with the TV's own software.

The gap the researchers documented between the traffic actually leaving the devices and the vague answers returned in response to legal data requests is exactly the asymmetry privacy law exists to correct. With Samsung and LG now bound to obtain informed consent before collecting ACR data, and three more manufacturers still in litigation, regulators appear to be treating always-on screen sampling as a consent problem rather than routine telemetry — a standard that could reshape how smart TVs ship their defaults.