Your TV is a ‘mass surveillance system’ says Texas, and the state is suing LG, Samsung, Hisense, TCL, and more to stop it

What IS your TV doing?

News By Lance Ulanoff published 16 December 2025

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Your smart TV may be a little too smart. A Texas lawmaker is suing five major TV manufacturers, claiming they're surveilling what you watch to build profiles and serve up advertising...or to do worse.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit on Monday against Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, and Hisense, claiming in a press release that they "have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition ("ACR”) technology."

Paxton goes on to label ACR as "an uninvited, invisible digital invader," and in one of the five separately filed suits, he calls Samsung TVs "a mass surveillance system."

What is ACR? The now more than a decade-old technology has a long history dating back to Shazam's use in 2011 and another company, Samba TV, which patented its own ACR tech that same year. Most of the early uses revolved around sound and music recognition. The technology ultimately added image or snapshot collection (and image recognition) and eventually made its way to 4K smart TVs.

What ACR does and why you might worry

Companies like LG, Hisense, Samsung, and others apparently now use ACR to identify what you're watching and connect you with relevant content, marketing, and advertising.

Paxton's suit claims that these ACR systems can capture screenshots of viewing habits as often as every 500 milliseconds and that the TV manufacturers "transmit that information back to the company without the user’s knowledge or consent."

Generally, though, data specific to who you are, like name, photos, address, etc, are not part of that delivery. Instead, third-party partners get information about content interests, and TVs or TV companies act as middlemen, delivering related content recommendations and advertising.

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