Samsung Is Being Sued Over Smart TVs That Secretly Record Your Screen

Twice a second, Samsung’s “smart” TVs capture what’s on your screen — and independent researchers and regulators outside the US say the company has built an advertising business on top of it.

The Cat House Meow • Tech & Consumer Affairs

That flat-screen glowing in the corner of your living room may be doing more than streaming your favorite shows. A technology built into Samsung’s smart TVs takes rapid-fire snapshots of whatever appears on screen, matches them against a content library, and feeds the result into one of the company’s fastest-growing businesses: television advertising. Regulators and independent researchers based outside the United States have spent the past two years documenting exactly how it works — and Texas has now sued over it.

What Is “ACR,” and How Does It Actually Work?

The technology at the center of the controversy is called Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR. Researchers at University College London, who ran the first independent study of how ACR behaves in practice, connected Samsung and LG smart TVs to a dedicated internet hub in both the UK and the US so they could watch, in real time, what the sets transmitted to outside servers.

Their findings, published at the 2024 ACM Internet Measurement Conference, showed that ACR captures screenshots of live TV many times a second, and does the same when a viewer plugs in an external device such as a laptop — meaning the TV can potentially work out what’s on a screen it isn’t even displaying content from. Checking the configuration file on an LG set, the team found a sample rate of 48 kilohertz, suggesting up to 48,000 snapshots could be captured every second, far beyond what a television’s own picture refresh rate would require. The researchers could not see exactly what was being sent, because the traffic was encrypted, but they could measure how often and how much data left the TV.

Dr Anna Mandalari of UCL’s Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, who co-authored the study, noted that most owners have no idea the feature exists or that they can turn it off. Her team also found that opting out required navigating several separate advertising and tracking settings across multiple sub-menus, while opting in typically takes a single click during setup — an imbalance a co-author from UC Davis described as making a genuine opt-out extremely difficult for a typical user.

What Samsung Actually Does With the Data

Samsung has been fairly candid with advertisers, if not with customers, about the scale of what it collects. In an interview covered by the UK’s The Register, Samsung’s own VP of Ad Sales and Operations, Tom Focetta, said the company’s ad platform draws on data from more than 50 million smart TVs and accounts for over 60 percent of the entire US ACR footprint. Focetta said this viewing data is “not sold, rented or distributed” to outsiders, but is instead used exclusively by Samsung itself to target advertising on and around its TVs.

That advertising business is substantial. Samsung sells what it calls “first screen ads” — banners on the home menu that the company says are seen roughly 400 times per television every month, are fully viewable, and can be targeted to specific audiences. Advertisers can also buy a “roadblock,” Samsung’s term for buying up 100 percent of first-screen ad impressions across its entire installed base for a period of time. According to a Samsung support statement quoted by the TV site FlatpanelsHD and reported by The Register, this banner generally cannot be switched off from the Smart Hub menu at all, regardless of a viewer’s ad settings.

Cord-cutters who avoid ad-supported apps aren’t left out either. In a paper aimed at advertisers, Samsung acknowledged that roughly 30 percent of streamers spend all their viewing time in apps with no ads — a group the company nicknamed “The Lost 30.” Its pitch to advertisers is that ACR data can identify which members of a household have already seen a given ad campaign on the television, and that “the right tech stack” then lets the same advertiser follow that person onto other connected screens, such as a phone, even after they’ve avoided the ad on the TV itself.

There’s also a question of what happens to the data once it’s collected. When the UCL researchers filed formal requests under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation asking Samsung and LG to disclose what personal data they held, the responses came back vague and covered a far smaller volume of information than the amount the team had actually observed being transmitted from the TVs. Dr Mandalari said this gap suggests that some information is being withheld from the very access requests designed to make it visible to consumers.

Separately, researchers quoted by the Lithuania-based outlet Cybernews — reporting on a multi-university study spanning the US, UK, and Spain — explained that ACR technically sends a “fingerprint,” a hash of what’s on screen, rather than the raw picture itself, to be matched against a reference library on the server side. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international digital-rights group cited in that reporting, has cautioned that a fingerprint rather than a raw image does not make the underlying data anonymous, since a household’s viewing pattern over time can itself be identifying.

Texas Sues Five TV Makers Over “Mass Surveillance”

In December 2025, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed separate lawsuits against Samsung, Sony, LG, Hisense, and TCL, accusing all five of using ACR to conduct what his office called an “uninvited, invisible digital invader” operating inside people’s homes. In the filing against Samsung specifically, reported by Cybernews, the state’s petition accused the company of deceptively guiding consumers into activating ACR while burying any real explanation of what that means in dense legal language few people read.

Samsung became the first of the five manufacturers to reach a resolution. According to Cybernews’ coverage of the settlement, Samsung agreed in February 2026 to stop collecting or processing ACR viewing data from Texas consumers without first obtaining their express, informed consent, and to redesign its on-screen disclosures so they are clear rather than buried in menus. The agreement carried no financial penalty. Cases against Sony, LG, Hisense, and TCL remained active as of that settlement, with Paxton’s office separately raising concerns that Hisense and TCL’s Chinese ownership could mean viewing data collected on their sets is exposed to Chinese state authorities.

Not Just a US Problem

The Texas case is the most aggressive legal action taken so far, but researchers and regulators outside the US have been raising the same alarm. Writing in The Register, columnist Rupert Goodwins pointed out that this isn’t new behaviour: TV maker Vizio was fined $2.2 million by the US Federal Trade Commission and the state of New Jersey back in 2017, and separately settled related class actions for around $17 million, over collecting viewing data from 11 million television sets without consent. A decade on, Goodwins argued, the underlying business model hasn’t changed, and Europe’s GDPR — despite giving consumers stronger legal rights than most of the US — hasn’t stopped the practice either; research cited in his piece found the problem persists on both sides of the Atlantic.

More recently, Cybernews reported that the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, has opened its own inquiry into how smart TVs and other connected devices handle personal data, visiting UCL’s IoT laboratory during the ACR research and working on new guidance for manufacturers expected for public consultation. That report noted a comparable case was, separately, still working its way through the US court system — a proposed class action in New York alleging Samsung shared TV owners’ viewing data with outside advertising partners without adequately informed consent.

How to Check — and Turn Off — ACR on Your Own TV

Regardless of how the lawsuits and regulatory inquiries conclude, ACR can typically be switched off in a few taps, though the UCL team’s own findings are a reminder that manufacturers generally make opting out considerably harder to find than opting in. Menu names vary by brand, model year, and software version, so treat this as a general guide.

For extra peace of mind, some privacy-conscious owners simply keep the television’s built-in apps and Wi-Fi disconnected altogether, streaming instead through an external device that isn’t tied to the TV maker’s own ad business. A screen doesn’t need an internet connection to display a picture — it only needs one to watch you back.