"Behold: Ken Paxton will now demonstrate that broken clocks are indeed right twice a day. The Texas Attorney General is notorious for, well, a very long list of reasons. But in this case, he at least appears to be doing consumers a solid: He sued five television companies for using ad-targeting spyware on their TVs. Texas sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL for allegedly recording what viewers watch without their consent."
"ACR is essentially a Shazam for video. Except in this case, its sole purpose is to target your viewing habits to help line advertisers' pockets. "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," Paxton's press release says."
The Texas Attorney General sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL for allegedly using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) to record viewers' TV activity without consent. ACR matches short content fingerprints to a database to identify what plays on a device, effectively acting like a Shazam for video to enable ad targeting. The technology can capture screenshots every 500 milliseconds, monitor viewing in real time, and transmit data to companies. Some TV software allegedly buries ACR activation in dense language and guides consumers to enable it. Concerns include ad-driven data harvesting and potential exposure of U.S. consumer data tied to Chinese-based manufacturers.
Read at Engadget
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