In December 2025, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a series of lawsuits against five global smart TV manufacturing companies for spying on people.
His core allegation is, “These companies have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (“ACR”) technology.”
Companies involved in these lawsuits: Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL (Technology Group Corporation).
Allegations of misusing user data: He also alleged that these companies “sell that consumer information to target ads across platforms for a profit,” arguing that users’ privacy and sensitive information are allegedly compromised and at risk.
Allegations of the Chinese government’s involvement: He further alleged that some of the companies mentioned in the lawsuit are connected to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Just Hisense and TCL are based in China. Meanwhile, Sony is a Japanese company, whereas both Samsung and LG are based in South Korea.
What is ACR tech? ACR refers to Automated Content Recognition (“ACR”) technology. “ACR periodically captures frames (and/or audio), builds a fingerprint of the content, and then shares it with an ACR server for matching it against a database of known content (e.g., movies, ads, live feed),” reads the explanation in 2024’s research paper titled “Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs.” The paper further states:
- Shazam-like auto detection of content: “When the fingerprint matches, the ACR server can determine exactly what piece of content is being watched on the smart TV.” This is quite similar to how the song-detection Shazam app works. Explore more about how Shazam works here.
- User profiling to serve personalised ads: “This enables smart TV platforms like Samsung and LG to profile users into audience segments, which are then used to target personalised ads.”
- Collected user data may not be anonymous: “Fingerprints in ACR are essentially a hash of the content, which can be matched server-side to identify the content. However, the fact that a hash of content rather than raw content is sent to ACR servers does not necessarily make the data ‘anonymous.’ Moreover, the viewing habits of a user are potentially identifying.”
Read the full research paper on ResearchGate here: [ PDF ]
“ACR captures everything on your screen, not just TV shows, but also YouTube videos, security or doorbell camera streams, and video or photos you send via Apple AirPlay or Google Cast, and from other devices connected to your TV by HDMI, including personal laptops, video game consoles, and Blu-ray players,” reads the Texas AG’s lawsuit against Sony.
What are the Texas Attorney General’s allegations against Sony?
- ACR tracing since 2013: Sony began incorporating ACR into their devices on or around 2013.
- Samba TV behind the ACR operations: Sony allegedly uses a third-party ACR-related software and hardware provider, Samba TV. The homepage of Samba TV states that it provides “massive end-to-end viewership data” to over 24 smart TV companies, including Panasonic, Sony, TCL, Toshiba, Hitachi and Phillips. “Samba TV is only one of potentially several third-party providers Sony uses to outsource data-harvesting functions,” reads the lawsuit.
- User data is more than consumer viewership data: “Sony’s ACR monitors consumers by continuously capturing audio and video from up to 50 million Sony Smart TVs in the U.S. This creates a detailed log of a household’s media consumption from what content was watched, when, and for how long, across all inputs and apps. Furthermore, because ACR, metadata, and identifiers combine, the collected data becomes more than just “what show a consumer watched.”
- User profiling included religion, political leaning, and sexual orientation data too: “Sony ACR data collection, when combined with identifiers, metadata, and network information, becomes a powerful tool for profiling, targeting, and behavioral tracking, often without informed consent. Sony profiles on consumers include intimate details like political leanings, sexual orientation, health interests, marital status, family composition, age, and religion.”
Remaining lawsuits against Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL (Technology Group Corporation) also follow similar allegations. You can access all the lawsuits using the links below:
He filed these lawsuits seeking ex parte temporary and permanent injunctions against unconsented ACR-related data collection and data processing operations.
LG agrees to take user consent for processing users’ ACR data: On May 11, 2026, Texas AG and LG submitted their agreed settlement, awaiting approval from the district court of Bell County in Texas. As per their settlement terms:
- LG shouldn’t process user data without “affirmative express consent.”
- LG should get the user consent at the time when user data is collected or immediately after collecting.
- LG should notify users when there are any changes to their terms.
P.S.: Thanks to Vikrant Rai at Adobe for pointing this story out to us. Feel free to use our anonymous tip-off.
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