What is ACR on a smart TV?

How it works

Samsung’s guide for advertisers describes screenshots taken every 500 milliseconds and matched against linear TV, ads, video games and its own free channels. LG’s recognition, run with its subsidiary Alphonso, uses short audio samples compared with commercial content; LG says it does not recognise conversations, and that the fingerprints are linked to the TV’s IP address or device ID and shared with partners for advertising and measurement.

What researchers measured

In 2024 a team of researchers measured Samsung and LG TVs in the UK and the US (Anselmi and colleagues, ACM IMC 2024). The LG TV contacted its recognition servers every 15 seconds, the Samsung once a minute. Traffic was highest with antenna TV and with an HDMI source, a laptop or a games console. In the UK they saw no recognition traffic while Netflix or YouTube played; in the US it stayed active on the makers’ own free channels.

After a full opt-out in the menus, the researchers saw no more communication with the recognition servers, in either country.

Who runs it

Some makers build their own system, others ship a third-party one, and the data often ends up with measurement companies.

• Samsung runs its own, and says the data is available only through Samsung Ads.
• LG works with Alphonso, part of LG Ad Solutions.
• Vizio’s Inscape licenses viewing data to advertisers, agencies and analytics firms; Nielsen signed a deal for it in 2022.
• Samba TV comes preinstalled on Sony TVs and others.
• Anoki runs on some Google TV and Android TV sets, and records the TV source too, HDMI included.

The rules

In 2017 Vizio settled charges from the US Federal Trade Commission and the State of New Jersey: it had switched recognition on by default and installed it remotely on TVs already sold. The order required express consent and the deletion of the data collected.

In December 2025 the Texas attorney general sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL. Samsung (February 2026) and LG (May 2026) agreed to ask Texas viewers for express consent; a court order stopped Hisense in the meantime, and the other cases were still open in May 2026.

In the European Union no regulator has ruled on ACR so far. The GDPR requires that withdrawing consent be as easy as giving it, and Italy’s data protection authority said back in 2005 that profiling viewers on interactive TV needs separate, specific consent.

What switching it off does not stop

The ACR switch covers ACR. The TV’s own telemetry, the apps you install and the broadcasters are separate. A 2023 study of HbbTV, the interactive layer of broadcast channels, found that most of the Italian channels tested contacted trackers before asking for consent, and half of them offered no way to withdraw it. Another study found that DNS blocklists catch only a minority of the tracking domains smart TVs contact.