With a lot of smart TVs and add-on media streamers, you’re the real product. That might come as a surprise if you’ve just spent several hundred dollars (or a few thousand), but the truth is that without advertising footing the bill, some of these devices would be even more expensive. Profit margins aren’t necessarily high in this sector.
That’s why the homescreen and screensaver on your Roku TV are full of banner ads. There may be something more insidious going on, however, and that’s called ACR, short for Automatic Content Recognition. Before I get into how to disable it, I’m going to explain what it is, and why it shouldn’t be on any consumer hardware.
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What is ACR, and why is it so terrible?
Violations of privacy
As its full name suggests, ACR is about detecting the specific content you’ve got onscreen. But this isn’t for your benefit — although TV makers and other supporters of the tech sometimes try to spin it as “personalizing” your experience, the real goal is improving marketers’ ability to target you with ads. If I’m interested in e-bikes and EUCs, marketers aren’t going to want to waste their budget serving me with ads for datacenter power supplies (something that’s happened repeatedly, believe it or not).
These things might not sound much different from your experience on the web, but what makes ACR truly insidious is how comprehensive it is. When it’s active, it’s always running in the background, no matter if you’re using your antenna, a cable box, or a device connected via HDMI. As far as its concerned, Microsoft Word, a Blu-ray movie, and that VHS tape of your first baby steps are all fair game. It’s not necessarily going to reap any useful data, and everything is anonymized — but you are being fingerprinted, nevertheless.
I should note that ACR isn’t necessarily active on every Roku TV, and it’s not present at all on Roku’s add-on devices. But a lot of TV makers choose to use it, so you should be prepared to disable it.
How to disable ACR on a Roku TV
A few short steps
There’s a standard way to shut off ACR on Roku TVs. When it’s present, incidentally, ACR may be on by default, since TV makers know you wouldn’t turn it on voluntarily — not unless they paid you directly, perhaps. In fact you may have been tricked into enabling it during setup under the “Smart TV Experience” euphemism.
Follow these steps to disable ACR:
- On your TV’s homescreen, select Settings from the sidebar menu.
- Navigate to Privacy -> Smart TV Experience.
- Depending on your TV and/or version of Roku OS, you may only see Use info from TV inputs, or options that reference ACR more directly. Disable everything.
There are some important caveats. For one, Roku and its partners will still have access to all the data they collected while ACR is on, which includes things like the dates, times, and durations of your viewing sessions. There’s no easy way to force companies to scrub this info.
Also, this doesn’t stop collection completely. Roku continues to gather (and share) data about how you’re using the native apps on your TV. Likewise, once you dip into a third-party app, the associated company may be collecting data within the limits of what the Roku platform allows. To lock things down as much as possible, you’ll have to disable any tracking options that apps contain, and switch on Roku’s global Limit Ad Tracking option. You can do that by heading over to Settings -> Privacy -> Advertising. In some cases you may need to disable Personalize ads instead.
