Your Smart TV is a spy.
— Naomi Brockwell priv/acc (@naomibrockwell) October 3, 2025
It takes snapshots, sometimes 100s per second, of everything you watch.
Surveillance has breached your home: we investigated how deep this goes.
Think twice before connecting your TV to the internet. pic.twitter.com/CfrHOF3CtM
Your Smart TV is taking constant snapshots of everything you watch. Wait, what?
Isn't watching TV meant to be a private activity from the comfort of your own home? Not anymore.
Do you think the things that we are watching on our Smart TVs are private just between us and our television?
Definitely not.
In this video, we're going to take a look at what Smart TVs are actually doing behind the glass. We'll break down how they collect your most sensitive data. We'll explore how that data is used to profile and manipulate you, and finally, we'll go over ways to protect yourself. Basically, in Internet age, Smart TV watches you.
WHAT SMART TVs ARE & HOW THEY OPERATE
Basically just modern TVs it's almost impossible not to get a non-Smart TV these days.
Most new TVs connect to the internet to stream shows and movies on demand they come preloaded with apps for watching content things like Amazon Prime video, YouTube, Hulu, cable provider apps, and fast channels.
They are also quietly sending out reports about everything you watch.
"Quietly" being the keyword.
If you ask a random user, "do you know that Smart TV is doing this?" they will likely not know about it. --Yash Vekaria, PhD Researcher, UC Davis. Who work on a paper about how bad smart TVs really are for privacy, "Watching TV with the Second Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs," Gianluca Anselmi, Yash Vekaria, et al., Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference, Nov. 4, 2024.
Our study focuses on two major players in the marketplace: one being LG, and the other Samsung. "We perform a series of experiments on two major Smart TV platforms Samsung and LG well we were investigating this we struck upon something which is known as automatic content recognition it's a technology built into the OS of modern TVs how it works is basically the smart TVs continuously capture snapshots of what the user is choosing. Now these snapshots could be audio snapshots or videos or they could be both and by doing this the TV manufacturer is able to recognize whatever is playing VCR data is allows them to know which household is watching a particular program so that they can Target ads to an impressionable audiences you will be astonished by
