How to disable automatic content recognition and data tracking on your smart TV

Your TV is probably watching you

It's called automatic content recognition, and pretty much every TV that connects to the internet has it

Whatever video goes through your TV, something inside it is going to recognize bits from the vision or the sound

and it will identify whatever you're watching, and then add it to the piles of data it is probably building up

You know, for the manufacturer to sell to people, to use for targeted ads, basically a whole lot of privacy eroding garbage that you probably want to turn off

The good news is you can turn it off. You just need to find it buried in some TV's menu systems, and every TV does it kind of differently

This is a Fire TV. It is the Amazon Fire TV 4 Series, and it is pretty easy to get to

Go into the Settings, go into Preferences, enter the PIN if you have one, Privacy Settings

Here's where it is. Automatic Content Recognition. Turn that off. While you're at it, turn off device usage data

Turn off Collect App Data. Turn off interest-based ads. And now your privacy is a little bit safer

These services can still know what you're watching, but that's the services. It's not a TV-wide feature that will say, oh, he watched something on DVD

Let's suggest something related to that, because that's creepy. Your viewing habits are a little bit more your own and not used by companies that use this for marketing and data mining and just a lot of not great stuff

That's how you do it on Fire TV. We're looking into all of the myriad different ways on how to turn it off on different smart TV platforms and manufacturer settings

Even on PCMag.com for a more in-depth look at how ACR works and how to disable it