Researchers from Northeastern University analyzed 12 smart TV models from 10 manufacturers, including Samsung, Vizio, and Roku. The study involved 5,943 controlled experiments using various signal sources and operating systems, which account for approximately 95% of the US smart TV market.
The study found that some Samsung, Vizio, and Roku devices continue to send data to servers associated with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) even after users disable the tracking feature in settings. Researchers noted that the traffic remained encrypted, preventing confirmation of the exact data transmitted.
Samsung devices running Tizen showed persistent ACR-related traffic in 41 out of 60 broadcast tests, 18 out of 30 HDMI tests, and all 30 streaming app tests. Vizio TVs continued to send traffic to Amazon Kinesis servers in 100% of scenarios, while Roku devices maintained activity within its own streaming channel.
In contrast, tests on LG, Amazon Fire TV, Sony, and VIDAA devices showed that disabling ACR effectively stopped the associated network traffic. The manufacturers involved have not yet provided an official response to the findings regarding the continued data exchange.
