Texas Sues TV makers: Everyone should sue #SmartTV #Privacy #DigitalPrivacy #ACR #TVTracking
The short version: Texas's lawsuit against smart TV makers over covert screen-tracking (ACR) is a reminder that surveillance capitalism isn't limited to license plates — it's baked into the devices in your living room.
Our Take
Credit to Mading Thok for breaking down a story that's easy to miss amid all the ALPR headlines: Texas is suing LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL, and Hisense over Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), the tech that quietly screenshots what's on your screen and ships that data off to advertisers and data brokers. It's a different flavor of the same problem we track here — private companies and governments normalizing constant passive data collection, then asking you to trust them with it.
The throughline from your driveway to your living room is the same: opt-out settings buried five menus deep, vague terms of service, and a business model that treats your daily habits as inventory. Just like Flock cameras capturing every plate that rolls down a street regardless of suspicion, ACR captures everything you watch regardless of consent you actually understood. Texas suing isn't a fluke — it's a sign regulators are starting to notice how normalized covert tracking has become across every screen and camera in our lives.
If this story makes you want to audit what's watching you, start by checking what's watching your car. Our camera map shows where ALPR surveillance is already deployed near you, and our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back on both the cameras outside and the ones inside your house.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Mading Thok, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.