Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed lawsuits against five major smart TV manufacturers in mid-December 2025, alleging the companies secretly capture screenshots of users’ screens as often as 7,200 times per hour to build advertising profiles. The suits name companies including Samsung and Hisense, with Paxton’s office claiming some have ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The legal action represents one of the most aggressive state-level challenges to the data collection practices embedded in the televisions sitting in millions of American living rooms.
Five TV Makers Accused of Covert Data Harvesting
The lawsuits, announced on December 15, 2025, target five companies that Paxton’s office says collect data from Texans’ televisions without their knowledge or consent, relying on what the state describes as hidden surveillance software. In the complaint, the attorney general alleges that these smart TVs use automatic content recognition, or ACR, to capture what appears on screen at rapid intervals, generating digital “fingerprints” of the content being watched. Those fingerprints are then matched against reference databases so that the manufacturers and their partners can determine precisely what a viewer is watching, whether it is a cable broadcast, a streaming platform, or content from a gaming console or Blu‑ray player.
According to the state, the manufacturers then package and sell this viewing information so advertisers can target households across devices for profit. Paxton’s office argues that this business model turns every TV into a perpetual data-harvesting terminal, allowing marketers to follow a household from the living room screen to phones, tablets, and laptops with coordinated ads. In the state’s telling, the lure of this recurring revenue stream helps explain why many smart TVs are sold at razor-thin margins or below cost: the real money comes not from hardware, but from the behavioral dossiers built on everything people watch.
How ACR Turns Your TV Into a Surveillance Tool
ACR technology has existed for years, but the Texas petitions portray it as far more intrusive than most consumers realize or reasonably expect. A peer‑reviewed article in the media studies journal Convergence describes ACR as a core component of modern advertising infrastructure, capable of transforming raw viewing behavior into detailed profiles that can be traded and activated across the digital marketing ecosystem. Drawing on that research, Texas argues that ACR is not a benign recommendation engine. Instead, it functions as a continuous monitoring system that silently catalogs what happens on a household’s screen.
That distinction is central to the lawsuits. When a TV suggests a new show, viewers may assume some limited tracking is occurring, tied to a particular app or service. But the state’s filings claim that ACR operates at the device level, capturing second‑by‑second records of all content displayed, regardless of source, and routing that data through advertising exchanges where outside buyers can access it. In this account, intimate viewing choices (from medical programs and religious services to news about controversial political issues) become data points linked to a home’s IP address and, potentially, to specific individuals, raising concerns not only about commercial exploitation but also about the possibility of sensitive information being misused or exposed in a breach.
Court Orders and the CCP Connection
Paxton moved quickly after filing the initial complaints. On December 17, 2025, his office announced that it had obtained a temporary restraining order against Hisense, a Chinese electronics manufacturer whose televisions allegedly rely on ACR to monitor users’ screens. The order, which bars the company from continuing the challenged data practices in Texas while the case proceeds, marked the first concrete enforcement step in the broader campaign against smart TV surveillance. State lawyers framed the ruling as an emergency measure to halt what they characterize as real‑time spying on Texans inside their homes.
By early January 2026, the effort had expanded to include Samsung, one of the world’s largest TV makers. In a subsequent filing, Paxton’s office said it had secured a significant court victory that stopped Samsung from using its smart TVs to illegally spy on Texas residents, emphasizing that the alleged misconduct was not confined to companies headquartered in China. The attorney general has nonetheless stressed national security themes, repeatedly warning that firms he describes as “CCP‑aligned” could funnel American viewing data abroad. In a December consumer alert, his office urged residents to be wary of certain smart TVs and accused them of tracking “everything that happens on your screen,” framing the issue as both a privacy threat and a geopolitical risk.
Privacy Law, Past Precedent, and Industry Pushback
The Texas lawsuits do not arise in a vacuum. In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission and the state of New Jersey reached a settlement with Vizio over allegations that the company secretly collected viewing histories from 11 million smart TVs without proper notice or consent. Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million and to implement privacy safeguards after regulators said it had used ACR‑like technology to capture what people watched and then sold that information to third parties. Paxton’s office points to that enforcement action as proof that regulators have long viewed undisclosed TV tracking as an unfair or deceptive practice under consumer protection law.
Even so, the Texas cases push into relatively untested legal territory by tying ACR to state‑level privacy statutes and, in some instances, to claims about foreign influence and data exfiltration. Industry advocates are likely to argue that ACR is disclosed in privacy policies and on‑screen prompts, that users can opt out, and that the data is anonymized before being shared. The state disputes those assertions, asserting that disclosures are buried, consent is illusory, and so‑called anonymization can often be reversed when viewing data is combined with other identifiers. How courts resolve these competing narratives could shape the boundaries of acceptable data collection in the connected‑device market for years to come.
What Texas Consumers Can Do Now
While the litigation proceeds, Paxton’s office has tried to give Texans practical guidance about how to protect themselves. In its December 19 consumer alert, the attorney general urged residents to review their smart TV settings, disable ACR features where possible, and consider disconnecting televisions from the internet if they are uncomfortable with the level of tracking. The alert also encouraged consumers to be skeptical of extremely low‑priced smart TVs, warning that subsidized hardware often signals a business model built on aggressive data monetization rather than one‑time product sales.
Consumer advocates add that Texans can take a few additional steps to limit exposure, even if they cannot fully escape the underlying ad‑tech ecosystem. Those measures include creating separate user profiles for different family members, periodically resetting advertising identifiers, and using external streaming devices that offer more granular privacy controls than some built‑in smart TV platforms. None of these tactics can fully neutralize ACR if it is embedded at the TV operating‑system level, but they can reduce the volume and precision of data that manufacturers and their partners collect. As the cases against Samsung, Hisense, and other manufacturers unfold, the outcome will determine not only whether Texans receive restitution or injunctive relief, but also whether smart TV makers nationwide must rethink how they monetize what happens on the biggest screen in the house.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
