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Stop your smart TV from tracking what you watch

Most smart TVs can recognise what’s on the screen and report it, even when the picture comes from a games console over HDMI. The setting that stops it sits in the TV’s menus, and it works. A DNS filter adds a second lock. Here is how to do both, and what neither can block.

By Antoine MOURY Published updated

What your TV sends

The technology is called automatic content recognition, or ACR. The TV regularly takes a fingerprint of what’s on the screen and matches it against a library, much like a music-recognition app, to know what you’re watching. That knowledge can then feed recommendations and advertising.

In 2024, researchers from University College London and other universities measured it on Samsung and LG TVs, in the UK and in the US (Anselmi, Vekaria et al., IMC 2024). What they found:

  • ACR traffic was there while watching broadcast TV, and while the TV was used as a plain screen over HDMI, for a laptop or a games console.
  • It wasn’t there while streaming from third-party apps such as Netflix or YouTube.
  • LG TVs sent data every 15 seconds, Samsung TVs once a minute.
  • In the US, ACR also ran on the TV makers’ own free channels, Samsung TV Plus and LG Channels, unlike in the UK.
  • Switching off the tracking options stopped all traffic to the ACR servers.

None of this is new. In 2017, Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle US charges that it had collected second-by-second viewing data from 11 million TVs without their owners’ consent (FTC). In December 2025, the Texas attorney general sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR; Samsung and LG have since agreed to ask Texans for explicit consent before collecting it (Malwarebytes, Fox 7 Austin).

The settings to switch off

Start here: this is the step the researchers showed to work. Menu names move from one model year to the next; the paths below are Consumer Reports’, updated in October 2025 (Consumer Reports).

Samsung. Settings → All Settings → General & Privacy → Terms & Privacy, then turn off Viewing Information Services. On older models, the menu is called Terms & Policy. The researchers also turned off interest-based advertisements, the customisation service and personalised-ads improvement; do the same while you’re there.

LG. Settings → All Settings → Support → Privacy & Terms → User Agreements, then turn off Viewing Information. Turn off the interest-based advertising agreement too, and Live Plus, the LG feature built on ACR, which the researchers also disabled. On 2019 and older sets, the user agreements are under General → About This TV.

Google TV and Android TV. According to Consumer Reports, Google TV doesn’t use ACR itself, but the TV’s maker may add its own, with its own settings. In Settings → Privacy → Ads, you can reset or delete the advertising ID.

If you reset the TV, it will present its agreements again at setup. Decline the optional ones there, and you won’t have to hunt for them afterwards.

A second lock: blocking by DNS

The settings stop ACR at the source. A DNS filter works at the network: when the TV asks for the address of an ACR server, the filter answers that it doesn’t exist. It’s a useful second lock, and it also cuts ad and tracking servers that the settings don’t cover.

The study names the servers: for Samsung, several names under samsungacr.com, samsungcloud.tv and samsungcloudsolution.com; for LG, names under alphonso.tv. We checked them on 14 September 2026 against two of the public lists AdHole uses by default for its DNS filter, HaGeZi Pro and the AdGuard DNS filter. Every ACR name in the study was on at least one of them, and all but one were on both.

With AdHole, it works like this: install it on a PC, then set the TV’s DNS to that computer once, in the TV’s network settings. AdHole doesn’t do it for you. The TV then stops reaching the ad and tracking servers on those lists, and the dashboard shows the devices that ask it the most, the most-blocked domains and a live feed of requests with the device behind each one, so you can see what the TV tries to reach.

What to know before relying on it:

  • We haven’t tested it on a TV. The researchers measured the settings, not DNS blocking. A maker can move ACR to new server names; the lists are refreshed once a day, but a list can lag behind. That’s why the settings come first.
  • The computer has to stay on. A TV pointed at it loses internet access when it’s off or asleep. On Windows, the computer’s network must also be set to Private.
  • Some routers slip in their own DNS. A router can announce its own DNS server over IPv6, and a TV that uses IPv6 may go back to it. If the TV doesn’t show up in the dashboard, check that first.

What can’t be blocked

  • Anything sent to servers the TV also needs. If tracking goes to the same server as software updates or the app store, blocking it breaks the TV. A DNS filter only helps with names it can refuse without harm.
  • What apps record on their own servers. A streaming app talks to its own servers, and what it notes about your viewing there, no network filter can see. It’s the same reason YouTube ads on a TV can’t be removed by DNS: they come from the same servers as the video.
  • The terms you accepted. Without accepting the TV’s terms and privacy policy, most smart features don’t work: the researchers couldn’t watch most content without them. What remains in your hands is declining the optional agreements.
  • Short of unplugging it. A TV that isn’t connected to the internet can’t send anything, at the cost of every smart feature. A separate streaming box then brings its own data collection.

Sources checked on 5 October 2026 and linked in the text.