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Does opting out of TV tracking work?

The Vizio Mini LED Quantum TV displaying the Vizio OS homepage on a wooden credenza.
TVs use automatic content recognition to gather viewing information about us, and opting out doesn’t always stop it. | Photo: John Higgins / The Verge

The fact our TVs are gathering our information isn't new, but what and how they're tracking - and if we can stop it - is hard to figure out. Researchers at Northeastern University monitored 12 TVs from 10 manufacturers to test whether opting out of automatic content recognition (ACR) actually works. While opting out was effective for most TVs - including LG, Amazon Fire TV, a Sony Bravia running Google TV, and those with Vidaa OS (which can be found on TVs from Hisense, Toshiba, and smaller brands like the Supersonic used in the study) - Samsung and Roku kept sending some data. And Walmart's Vizio TV continued on as if the opt-out hadn't eve …

Read the full story at The Verge.



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