Do you think you are safe from prying eyes in front of your television? Error. Researchers have just proven that connected TVs constantly take screenshots of everything you watch!
It’s no secret that everyday digital and connected devices collect a large amount of personal data: computers, smartphones, watches, cars, and even washing machines, all know a lot about their users. And connected TVs are of course no exception. If we already knew that installed applications also collected a lot of information, another particularly intrusive tracking system has just been highlighted by an international research team.
In a rigorous studyAmerican, English and Spanish researchers show that connected TVs integrate a tracking mechanism by Automatic Content Recognition, or Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) in English. According to the authors, this system is “a Shazam-like technology that works by periodically capturing the content displayed on a television screen and compares it to a content library to detect the content displayed at any given time”.
In other words, the connected TV records screenshots of the content viewed at regular intervals, then transforms them into “digital fingerprints” before sending them to a remote server, where they are analyzed to determine the viewer’s viewing habits. the user, in order to send him targeted advertising. If the process is not completely new, its level of integration is however unprecedented: here it is not a third-party application, but a mechanism anchored directly in the television system.
To highlight the operation and extent of ACR tracking, the researchers analyzed the network traffic between the television and the manufacturer’s servers… and their conclusions are striking. On the one hand, tracking is active in almost all viewing modes, whether linear TV, Fast TV or even when the TV is used as an external display via an HDMI cable. Only a few streaming services, such as Netflix or YouTube, escape ACR’s monitoring. On the other hand, the frequency of transmission of the data collected is dizzying, ranging from every minute to… every 15 seconds.
Suffice it to say that almost all of what we watch on our connected TVs is captured for analysis. As part of their study, the researchers focused on two manufacturers, Samsung and LG, and on three countries, the United States, Great Britain and Spain, a European country although subject to the GDPR. Although differences in operation were noted between geographic areas, the ACR was very active in the three countries. And obviously, even if the study only focused on two major manufacturers, this tracking system is certainly in place on the majority of connected TVs.
Good news, however: on all the televisions tested, options to deactivate this tracking were present, and their use effectively stopped the sending of data to the manufacturer’s servers. The authors also give the names of the options to activate and deactivate on page 8 of their study, without however indicating their precise location in the parameters. So, if you are the happy owner of a connected television and a little concerned about your privacy, it may be useful to take a few minutes to explore the privacy settings of your device, to deactivate the famous system ACR tracking system.