Behold: Ken Paxton will now prove that the broken clock is indeed correct twice a day. The Texas Attorney General is notorious for a host of reasons. But in this case, he at least appears to have delivered tangible benefits to consumers: He’s suing five TV companies for using ad-targeting spyware on their TVs.
The state of Texas is suing Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL, saying they record what viewers watch without their consent. This predatory technology is Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which identifies content being played on a device by matching short content fingerprints against a database.
ACR is essentially video Shazam. Except in this case, its sole purpose is to target your viewing habits to help advertisers make money. “The software captures screenshots of a user’s TV display every 500 milliseconds, monitors viewing activity in real time and transmits that information back to the company without the user’s knowledge or consent,” Paxton’s press release states.
The LG Advertising Solutions website boasts how ACR helps advertisers “target based on content viewership, including program, network, application, service or genre.” Because it works with anything running on the device, it can identify purchases and subscriptions, track gamer habits and pinpoint users by region, city or zip code.
There should be a setting on your TV to turn it off. But, as a lawsuit filed against LG in Texas points out, TV software often “deceptively leads consumers to activate ACR and hides explanations of its meaning in arcane legalese that few people read or understand.”
Paxton’s press release emphasized that Hisense and TCL’s home base is China. “These ties to China raise serious concerns about consumer data collection, exacerbated by China’s national security laws, which give the Chinese government the ability to obtain U.S. consumer data,” the statement read.
