A test of LG smart TVs by researchers at University College London in 2024 found that the sets were, in fact, spying on their owners — quietly logging what was being watched and sending the information back to the manufacturer. The findings point to a feature built into most modern smart TVs that watches what you watch. It’s called automatic content recognition (ACR), and it works by fingerprinting whatever appears on screen — live TV, streaming apps, content from a game console, Blu-ray player, or laptop plugged in over HDMI — then sending that information back to the manufacturer and its advertising partners.

The technology is not hidden exactly, but it is not obvious either. All major TV brands including Samsung, LG, and Hisense use some form of automatic content recognition. Nearly every major brand ships with it switched on by default.

That 2024 study found the full scale of data collection was hard to verify because the transmissions were encrypted — but one LG TV’s ACR configuration was set to a sampling rate suggesting tens of thousands of snapshots per second, far more than needed simply to identify what’s playing.

South Africans aren’t immune: Samsung, LG, and Hisense are among the most widely sold smart TV brands locally, and all of them ship with some form of ACR switched on by default. Under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), collecting personal information — including viewing habits — requires the data subject’s informed consent, usually presented to the consumer in the user license agreement when setting up the television. Whether that buried, opt-out style of consent actually meets POPIA’s standard has not been tested locally, but overseas regulators have already concluded it doesn’t meet theirs: in the United States, Texas’s Attorney General sued Sony, Samsung, LG, and Hisense over their ACR practices, and Samsung settled in February 2026 by agreeing to obtain explicit consent before collecting viewing data.

No South African law currently singles out ACR the way the Kentucky legislature has done in the US — that state passed the first ACR-specific statute in 2026, requiring explicit consent before a TV can collect viewing data. Locally, POPIA’s general consent and purpose-specification rules would still apply to any South African broadcaster, retailer, or manufacturer processing local viewers’ data, but there has been no local test case or Information Regulator ruling on smart TV tracking specifically. For now, the default for South African viewers is the same as elsewhere: tracking is switched on unless you turn it off yourself.

For anyone who wants to check, the opt-out is usually buried a few menus deep under Settings, General & Privacy, or Terms & Privacy. And turning off the most visible toggle isn’t always enough — on some sets there are two or three separate settings that all need to be disabled to fully stop the data flow.