Anselmi, Gianluca;
Vekaria, Yash;
D'Souza, Alexander;
Callejo, Patricia;
Mandalari, Anna Maria;
Shafiq, Zubair;
(2024)
Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs.
In:
IMC '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference.
(pp. pp. 622-634).
ACM
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Abstract
Smart TVs implement a unique tracking approach called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) to profile viewing activity of their users. ACR is a Shazam-like technology that works by periodically capturing the content displayed on a TV's screen and matching it against a content library to detect what content is being displayed at any given point in time. While prior research has investigated third-party tracking in the smart TV ecosystem, it has not looked into second-party ACR tracking that is directly conducted by the smart TV platform. In this work, we conduct a black-box audit of ACR network traffic between ACR clients on the smart TV and ACR servers. We use our auditing approach to systematically investigate whether (1) ACR tracking is agnostic to how a user watches TV (e.g., linear vs. streaming vs. HDMI), (2) privacy controls offered by smart TVs have an impact on ACR tracking, and (3) there are any differences in ACR tracking between the UK and the US. We perform a series of experiments on two major smart TV platforms: Samsung and LG. Our results show that ACR works even when the smart TV is used as a ''dumb'' external display, opting-out stops network traffic to ACR servers, and there are differences in how ACR works across the UK and the US.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs |
| Event: | IMC '24: ACM Internet Measurement Conference |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3646547.3689013 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3646547.3689013 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Smart TV, ACR, Fingerprinting, Advertising, Tracking, Privacy |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Electronic and Electrical Eng |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10200730 |
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