$20M in Fines and Vizio Smart TVs Opt Out of Spying Option Does Nothing

What it is

PCPer, in an article dated November 2026, reports a Northeastern University study of 5,943 experiments on twelve commercial smart TVs. The study tested whether the menu opt-out for automatic content recognition (ACR) stops the related network traffic. The researchers' stated finding is that the opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems: webOS, Fire OS, Sony Google TV and VIDAA OS.

How it works

The researchers did not try to decode what ACR sent to known advertiser or tracker addresses. They compared the volume and destinations of a TV's traffic before and after opt-out. The page quotes the paper on two failures:

• Samsung Tizen: traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in more than 60% of evaluated scenarios.
• Vizio SmartCast: a content-correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis keeps receiving traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios.

Preconditions / Affected

• Vizio SmartCast: affected in every opted-out scenario. The page says traffic did not change when tracking was disabled.
• Samsung Tizen: affected in more than 60% of scenarios.
• VIDAA OS (including Hisense and Toshiba sets): the opt-out works, but the page says the ACR traffic is sent unencrypted and contains data it should not. The summary does not mention this.

What to do

The page gives no remediation steps. The only implication it draws is that the menu setting cannot be trusted on Vizio or Samsung sets. Anyone who needs the traffic stopped would have to block it at the network level, which the page does not describe.

Caveats

• The study measured traffic volume and destinations, not content. It shows data is still flowing, not what it contains.
• The page contradicts itself on Samsung. One sentence says only 60% of Tizen TVs showed decreased or no traffic. The quoted paper says traffic persists in more than 60% of scenarios. These are opposite readings, so use the paper's wording.
• The page does not say which VIDAA data is exposed in the unencrypted traffic.
• The page cites an FTC fine of $2.2 million against Vizio in 2017 and a $17 million lawsuit that Vizio lost. It offers these as background, not as part of the study.