Automated Content Recognition is the feature nobody asked for and almost nobody knows they have. Your television samples what is on its screen — every few seconds, on some models more often than that — fingerprints it, and matches it against a catalogue to determine what you are watching. Broadcast, streaming, game console, DVD, your own home video off a USB stick. It does not matter what the source is. The TV is reading the screen.

The resulting profile is sold into ad targeting. It has been standard on mainstream televisions for a decade, as we traced from Vizio’s 2017 FTC settlement through the Texas lawsuits.

In 2026, two of the five manufacturers Texas sued decided they would rather settle.

What Texas Got

Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five television manufacturers in December 2025 — Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL — alleging they used ACR to collect viewing data without consumers’ knowledge or meaningful consent, then monetized it through ad targeting.

Samsung settled on February 26, 2026. The company must stop collecting or processing ACR viewing data without the express consent of Texas consumers, and rewrite its on-screen privacy prompts and dialogs so the choice is actually presented rather than buried in a setup flow people click through.

LG settled on May 11, 2026, formalized as an Agreed Final Judgment in The State of Texas v. LG Electronics U.S.A., Inc. Same core requirement — express consent before ACR collection — plus a pop-up disclosure on LG televisions explaining how viewing data may be collected and used, with a clear opt-out. The LG judgment also contains a provision with no obvious precedent in consumer privacy settlements: LG is explicitly prohibited from transferring viewing data to the Chinese Communist Party.

Sony, Hisense, and TCL are still litigating.

What This Actually Changes

Be precise about the scope, because the headlines overstate it.

It is a consent requirement, not a ban. ACR is not being removed from Samsung and LG televisions. The companies must ask first and honor the answer. If you say yes — and consent flows are designed by people who want you to say yes — the screen-sampling proceeds exactly as before.

It applies to Texans. These are agreements with one state attorney general under Texas law. Manufacturers frequently apply such changes nationally rather than maintain two code paths, but nothing in these settlements obliges them to, and nothing extends them outside the United States.

It covers two of five defendants. If you own a Sony, Hisense, or TCL, nothing has changed for you pending the outcome of the ongoing case.

It does not touch the streaming platform layer. Roku, Google TV, Fire TV, and the apps themselves run their own tracking, independent of the television manufacturer’s ACR. Many “TCL” and “Hisense” sets are Roku TVs, which means the relevant setting lives in Roku’s menu, not the manufacturer’s.

Still — a state AG extracting binding express-consent requirements from two of the world’s largest TV makers is a real result, and it is the second time in a year that public and legal pressure has forced a rollback in home surveillance, after the collapse of the Ring–Flock police footage partnership. The pattern worth noticing: none of these features were withdrawn because the market rejected them. They were withdrawn under compulsion.

Turn It Off Yourself, Wherever You Live

You do not have to wait for a settlement, and if you live outside Texas you shouldn’t. Every major platform lets you disable ACR — the setting is simply never named “Automated Content Recognition.”

Samsung: Home → Settings → Support → Terms & Privacy → Privacy Choices → turn off Viewing Information Services. While you’re there, disable Interest-Based Advertising and Voice Recognition Services.

LG (webOS): Settings (gear) → All Settings → General → System → Additional Settings → set Live Plus to off. Also enable Limit Ad Tracking.

Vizio: Menu → System → Reset & Admin → turn off Viewing Data.

Sony (Google TV / Android TV): Settings → All Settings → Privacy → toggle Samba Interactive TV off. On older models: Settings → Device Preferences → Usage & Diagnostics → turn off reporting.

Roku-based TVs (many TCL and Hisense models): Settings → Privacy → under Advertising, uncheck Personalize ads; under Smart TV Experience, turn off Use info from TV inputs. That last one is the ACR toggle.

Note the naming across that list: Viewing Information Services, Live Plus, Viewing Data, Samba Interactive TV, Use info from TV inputs. Five vendors, five euphemisms, one feature. That the setting is never called what it is remains the strongest evidence about how it was expected to be received.

Check after every major firmware update. These settings have a documented tendency to reset — a new terms-of-service acceptance screen after an update can quietly re-enable what you turned off. Re-check twice a year.

The Network-Level Option

Menu toggles depend on the television honoring them. If you’d rather not extend that trust, control it at the network layer instead:

Don’t connect the TV to the internet at all. A television fed by an Apple TV, a Roku stick, or a media PC is a display panel. It cannot fingerprint what it cannot report. This is the cleanest fix available and costs you nothing but the built-in apps, which are worse than the external box anyway.

Put the TV on an isolated IoT VLAN with restrictive outbound rules if you do connect it. Our complete guide to securing your smart home network covers the setup, and it applies equally to every other appliance whose cloud you can’t audit.

Watch the outbound traffic for a week. A TV with ACR “disabled” that still maintains a steady telemetry stream to an analytics endpoint is answering the question for you. Texas sued because manufacturers said one thing and did another; verification is the only version of trust that survives that.

Bottom Line

Texas got two of five manufacturers to agree that reading your screen requires asking you first. That is a genuine win, and it is narrower than it sounds: it is consent, not removal; it is one state; and three defendants are still in court.

The setting has been in your menus the entire time under a name chosen so you wouldn’t find it. It takes ninety seconds. Go turn it off — and if you want the guarantee rather than the promise, leave the television off your network entirely and let a device you actually chose do the streaming.

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