Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five large TV manufacturers yesterday, alleging that their smart TVs spy on viewers without consent. Paxton sued Samsung, the longtime TV market share leader, along with LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL.
“These companies have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (‘ACR’) technology,” Paxton’s office alleged in a press release that contains links to all five lawsuits. “ACR in its simplest terms is an uninvited, invisible digital invader. This software can capture screenshots of a user’s television display every 500 milliseconds, monitor viewing activity in real time, and transmit that information back to the company without the user’s knowledge or consent. The companies then sell that consumer information to target ads across platforms for a profit. This technology puts users’ privacy and sensitive information, such as passwords, bank information, and other personal information at risk.”
The lawsuits allege violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, seeking damages of up to $10,000 for each violation and up to $250,000 for each violation affecting people 65 years or older. Texas also wants restraining orders prohibiting the collection, sharing, and selling of ACR data while the lawsuits are pending.
Texas argues that providing personalized content and targeted advertising are not legitimate purposes for collecting ACR data about consumers. The companies’ “insatiable appetite for consumer data far exceeds what is reasonably necessary,” and the “invasive data harvesting is only needed to increase advertisement revenue, which does not satisfy a consumer-necessity standard,” the lawsuits say.
Paxton is far from the first person to raise privacy concerns about smart TVs. The Center for Digital Democracy advocacy group said in a report last year that in “the world of connected TV, viewer surveillance is now built directly into the television set, making manufacturers central players in data collection, monitoring, and digital marketing.” We recently published a guide on how to break free from smart TV ads and tracking.