“Despite its importance, little is known about the privacy implications of deployed ACR implementations, in part due to the opaque nature of their deployments and challenges with automated testing,” the report states.
The size of the TV market makes analyzing ACR deployments difficult, the paper says, because it requires “a large number of devices and experiments.”
Another obstacle is that “smart TVs are locked down,” making “techniques such as rooting and TLS interception generally unavailable (and creating) a need for techniques that reliably infer ACR activity,” the report says.
Avoid Smart TV Tracking
Smart TV makers’ persistent opaque tracking practices have prompted more people to consider modifying the software on their devices, including using a growing number of software tools designed to turn smart TVs into dumb TVs. Meanwhile, US non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy is suing Vizio in a bid to make it easier for users to control their TV’s software, including by disabling ACR.
To help people reduce the risk of their TV tracking them without consent, the report’s authors created a list of network addresses, domains, and URLs that people can block “to prevent devices or apps from communicating with ACR services” without affecting TV viewing quality.
On the journal’s website, the researchers recommended that TV manufacturers “list all inputs monitored by ACR, such as antenna, HDMI, apps, and screen mirroring, in the privacy policy” and “authenticate and encrypt all ACR traffic.”
The document recommends that users remove smart TVs from their network and “use an external streaming device that does not perform ACR, or use disabling ACR on operating systems where this has been shown to be effective in our measurements.”
For tips on avoiding smart TV monitoring, check out our guide on how to free yourself from smart TV tracking.
Gn tech
