The television is the one screen a Malaysian household tends to share, and on smart TVs from the leading brands, Samsung and LG among them, it can quietly keep a record of what plays on it. The feature is called Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, and it works like Shazam for your screen: the TV samples the picture, turns each frame into a digital fingerprint, and matches it against a library to work out what is being watched.
A 2024 study by researchers at University College London, UC Davis and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid measured this on a single Samsung set and a single LG set in a lab. The study notes the LG set capturing a frame of the screen roughly every 10 milliseconds and the Samsung set about twice a second, figures the brands state in their own materials. Reading the network traffic, the researchers then saw the LG set send batches of fingerprints to partner servers about every 15 seconds and the Samsung set contact its servers around once a minute. They inferred the behaviour from encrypted traffic to domains they identified as ACR endpoints rather than by reading the data itself, and the exact figures belong to those test units, not to every model on a Malaysian shelf.
Samsung's own support pages spell out what ACR keeps: your viewing history, the programmes you watch and for how long, a device identifier, and your IP address. Samsung says it does not record the actual video on your screen, only a fingerprint of it, and that owners choose to switch the feature on during setup. The commercial value is advertising: knowing what a household watches lets a platform target ad slots more precisely.
This is not a hypothetical worry. In 2017 Vizio agreed to pay US$2.2 million to settle charges from the United States Federal Trade Commission and the state of New Jersey that it had collected viewing data from 11 million televisions without telling owners, tied that data to household information, and passed it to advertisers. The case is about the same category of data ACR handles, which is why the practice keeps drawing regulators.
Malaysia sits inside this because we are viewers worth targeting. Research from Omnicom Media Group and CINT, released in 2025 and reported by the industry title MARKETECH APAC, found that 58 per cent of Malaysian connected-TV viewers come from high-income homes, above the 47 per cent regional average, and that 72 per cent of respondents recalled seeing ads on streaming platforms. To an advertiser, that is a room worth getting into, which is the whole point of the fingerprint.
Malaysian owners do have a law to point to, the same set of privacy questions the country is already wrestling with as it rolls out biometric systems at the border. The Personal Data Protection Act governs how companies handle personal data collected in commercial dealings and generally asks for consent, and viewing history tied to your device and IP address is arguably the sort of data it covers. The consent, though, is typically given in the setup screens when the TV is new, in much the same way a banking app can change how it verifies you without you registering it. The practical fix is to go back and switch it off.
According to Samsung's and LG's own privacy settings, on a recent Samsung set the path is roughly Settings, then General and Privacy, then Terms and Privacy, where you turn off Viewing Information Services (that is ACR), Interest-Based Advertising and Voice Recognition Services. On an LG set running webOS, the feature is called Live Plus, found under Settings, General, System and Additional Settings, with a further pair of toggles for Viewing Information and Interest-Based Advertisement in the privacy and user-agreement menus. The exact wording moves between models and software versions, and the study tested only one set from each brand, so look for those words rather than an exact path.
None of this stops the television working. Turning it off mainly removes the personalised ad rows and some content recommendations, and in the researchers' tests the streaming apps did not touch ACR at all, with the traffic going quiet inside third-party apps like Netflix and YouTube. A few voice or recommendation features can lean on the same agreement, so you may be asked to confirm. The same study found the ACR traffic appeared while watching live broadcast TV and when the set was used as an HDMI display for a console or laptop, so the switch mainly affects live and external-input viewing.
The toggles live in the privacy section of the settings menu, so the change takes only a few taps. It is worth checking again after a big software update, since these menus sometimes move between firmware versions.
Image(s) courtesy of Kevin Woblick and Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash.
