Your TV is watching you

The Markup tells Your Smart TV Knows What You’re Watching:

The most popular smart TVs sold today use automatic content recognition (ACR), a kind of ad surveillance technology that collects data on everything you view and sends it to a proprietary database to identify what you’re watching and serve you highly targeted ads.

[…]

ACR identifies what’s displayed on your television, including content served through a cable TV box, streaming service, or game console, by continuously grabbing screenshots […]

These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second.

And disabling it is:

Depending on the platform, turning off ACR took us between 10 and 37 clicks.

Maybe new privacy laws are required to regulate these low privacy business practices.

I have always been suspicious of “smart TVs”. This definitely take the cake. Consumer Electronics company have become shady as fuck, pardon my French, and this is one more piece of evidence.