Our TVs Have Been Spying on Us. It’s About to Get Worse.
With the rise of streaming, it’s obvious you don’t own the shows you watch on Netflix or Hulu. You lose access to content the minute your bill is overdue.
When it comes to the TV on which you watch that show, however, it sure feels like you own it. After all, you bought the device and installed it in your living room or bedroom. No one tells you which streaming service to use or which Blu-ray player to hook up. You own it, so you control how it is used.
Loss of control is the canary in the coal mine of ownership. At the end of March, that canary’s song wavered as Walmart announced its new Vizio televisions will require customers to sign in to Walmart accounts to access smart TV features.
This move, one of the most aggressive in undermining owners’ control of their televisions to date, is the latest in an industry with a long history of surveillance.
The history of watching us watch TV
Since the invention of the television, companies have wanted to know what Americans were watching. The A.C. Nielsen Company, now known as Nielsen IQ, first created television ratings in 1950. In exchange for allowing the company to install meters that monitored when a TV was in use and to which channel it was tuned, Nielsen would pay a group of demographically representative families to track what they watched. Monitoring viewing habits paid off as the resulting data served a wealthy market: the advertising industry.
As technology has progressed, so have the ways that Nielsen and others track what people watch. The development of automatic content recognition (ACR)—which companies now owned by Roku, Vizio, and Nielsen began to patent as early as 2008—added TV manufacturers to the mix.
ACR allows TV makers and other surveillance businesses to more accurately track watching habits at a far greater scale. Instead of making assessments based on the channel to which an owner’s set is tuned, ACR takes snapshots of audio or video as often as every 10 milliseconds from any media source connected to your TV, and compares them against a broader video database. Because the technology is built into devices and ‘consent’ to be tracked is often buried in the terms of service required to use smart features, manufacturers and their ACR partners are able to track what nearly every smart TV viewer is watching.
After a 2017 Federal Trade Commission complaint against Vizio for collecting data without consent, more TV makers have moved to allow consumers to opt out of ACR tracking. But many don’t make it easy. Manufacturers often obscure the software’s invasive nature by naming ACR technology to imply improved user experiences and hiding the opt-out option 4-10 clicks into the settings menu.
Even if a user has previously opted out, data-sharing permissions are also often re-enabled during software updates. Those wishing to take more complete measures, such as permanently deleting ACR software, risk bricking their device.
As a result, companies gather up to 100 billion data points each day, which they use to build advertising profiles about individual viewers that can include information such as suspected race, political leanings, religious beliefs, age, and geographic location.
TV makers are in the surveillance business, and business is a-booming
Fueled by ACR data, the connected TV (CTV) advertising business is extremely lucrative. One estimate predicted the total CTV ad spend to hit $33 billion in 2025 and grow to $47 billion by 2028.Walmart CFO John David Rainey recently credited the company’s 2024 acquisition of Vizio for the “triple-digit growth in advertising,” which raked in roughly $6.4 billion in profit in 2025 and now represents roughly a fifth of the company’s operating income.
Requiring new Vizio TV owners to log in with their Walmart account shows the company plans to take its surveillance even further. Its stated goal of this integration is to remove the disconnect between “commerce and measurement” and create an “identity framework across devices, connecting streaming engagement directly with retail interaction.”
In other words, simply tracking what you’re watching and serving you targeted ads isn’t enough. Walmart wants to use that information to create an endless feedback loop that enables you to buy, buy, buy. And Walmart is not alone—competitors are integrating advertising and e-commerce by partnering with Amazon to more precisely track and target audiences.
Why can manufacturers peep on the device you own?
Americans might not think twice about signing into an additional account when they set up a new TV. But if your neighbor stood outside your window while you watched Friends, you would probably close your curtains and lock your door. If he showed up the next day to try to sell you a Central Perk mug, you might look into getting a restraining order.
While you can’t see them, what TV manufacturers and their ACR partners are doing with your data is just as creepy. Once your TV is connected to the internet, Amazon or Walmart might as well be sitting on your couch.
Today’s decline of ownership isn’t just about media—it’s now also about the device its consumed on. Invasive data collection practices exploit consumers’ personal data while overly broad terms of service and anti-consumer design make it difficult to stop its flow. Without the ability to strip such technology out of the devices they own, consumers are faced with a double edged sword: protect their privacy, or use the smart features they paid for.
