Turn Off ACR (Automatic Content Recognition)
Pick up your TV remote. Go to Settings. Somewhere in there, buried under menus you have probably never opened, is a feature called Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR. It is on right now. Almost every smart TV sold in India in the last five years ships with it enabled out of the box, and unless you went looking for it during setup, it has been running quietly since the day you unboxed the thing.
ACR works by taking a snapshot of whatever is displayed on your screen, roughly every few seconds, and matching it against a database. The TV knows what you are watching at any given moment. Not just Netflix or Hotstar. If you have a set-top box connected via HDMI, ACR can identify the channel and the programme. If you are playing a Blu-ray, it logs that too. If your kid is gaming on a PlayStation plugged into the same TV, ACR recognises the game. Every pixel on the display is data, and ACR is the mechanism that reads it, packages it, and sends it off to the manufacturer or their advertising partners.
The reason this matters is simple: you did not buy a television to be surveilled. You bought it to watch cricket on Saturday afternoon or binge a show after the kids go to sleep. But when ACR is active, the TV is watching you watch it, and that information gets sold to advertisers who use it to build a profile of your household. What genres you prefer, what time of day you watch, how long each session lasts, when you pause, when you switch off. That profile has monetary value, and the TV manufacturer gets a cut every time an ad is targeted at you based on it.
You agreed to all of this during initial setup. That screen with the long terms and conditions that nobody reads because the whole family is standing around waiting for the TV to turn on? That was your consent. But consent given without understanding is not really consent, and you can withdraw it right now.
Samsung (Tizen OS): Open Settings > General > Privacy. On newer models manufactured after 2022, it might be under Settings > General & Privacy > Privacy instead. Look for “Viewing Information Services” and turn it off. That is the ACR toggle. While you are on that screen, also disable “Interest-Based Advertisements.” Samsung uses both settings in tandem: one collects the data, the other uses it for ad targeting. Killing both means the TV stops snooping and stops personalising the ads it shows you on the home screen. If your Samsung model has a built-in microphone, head to Settings > General > Voice and switch off voice wake-up. Some 2023 and 2024 models have a separate “Privacy Choices” menu that consolidates everything in one place, but the labels can change with firmware updates, so poke around if the exact path does not match. The setting you want always has the word “viewing” in it.
LG (webOS): LG calls its ACR implementation Live Plus. Go to Settings > General > Live Plus and switch it off. That alone stops the content fingerprinting. Then go to Settings > General > Additional Settings > Advertisements and enable “Limit Ad Tracking.” On 2023 and later models running webOS 23 or above, there is also a “Viewing Information” toggle tucked under the privacy menu. Turn that off as well. LG has been adding more AI-based recommendations with each firmware update, and those draw on viewing data too. Check Settings > General > AI Service and disable anything labelled “AI Recommendation” or “AI Sound” unless you specifically want those features. Each one uses your usage patterns to personalise its output, and each one phones home with data to do so.
Xiaomi / Mi TV (PatchWall + Android TV): Mi TVs are tricky because they run two software layers that collect data independently of each other. The base is Android TV (or Google TV on newer models), and on top of that sits PatchWall, Xiaomi’s own content interface. You need to address both. For the Android TV layer: go to Settings > Device Preferences > Privacy > Usage & Diagnostics and turn it off. Then go to Settings > Google > Ads, disable ad personalisation, and hit “Reset advertising ID” while you are there. Resetting the ID breaks the link between your past viewing behaviour and future ads. For PatchWall, open its interface, find settings (usually a gear icon at the top right), and switch off every data sharing and recommendation toggle you see. PatchWall does not give you one clean master switch the way Samsung does. You have to go through each option individually. It is tedious but worth it. Between the Android layer and PatchWall, your Mi TV was likely reporting to both Google and Xiaomi simultaneously.
Other Android TV / Google TV brands (OnePlus, Realme, TCL, Kodak, Vu): The Android TV steps described above work for all of them. Go through Settings > Privacy, turn off Usage & Diagnostics, disable ad personalisation under the Google section, and while you are in there, turn off location services if you are not using voice commands that need location context. Realme TVs have an additional “Smart Manager” layer that behaves like PatchWall. Check its settings too.
After you turn these settings off, your recommendations will get less personalised. You will still see ads on the home screen of most smart TV interfaces, but they will be generic rather than targeted. That is the only downside, and most people consider it a reasonable exchange for not having their TV log every show they watch and every game they play.
Kill the Microphone
This one is quick.
If you regularly use voice search to find shows or control your TV, you have already decided the trade-off is worth it. Skip ahead. But if you have never once spoken to your television and have no plans to start, the microphone should be disabled. It is sitting there in a passive listening state right now, waiting for a wake word it will probably never hear from you.
The manufacturers say that the mic only records after it detects the trigger phrase. That claim is mostly accurate, but the word “mostly” is doing heavy lifting. Google, Amazon, and Apple have all publicly acknowledged that their voice assistants sometimes activate by mistake. A word in a TV show that sounds close enough to “OK Google.” A child in the next room saying something that the mic interprets as “Alexa.” Background conversation that hits the right frequency. These false triggers create short audio recordings that get sent to company servers for processing. In most cases, no human ever listens to them. But the recordings exist, and they are stored for some period of time, and the companies have been caught using them for training speech recognition models without clear user consent.
Indian households have a specific vulnerability here that does not get enough attention. Living rooms in most Indian homes are not single-purpose entertainment rooms. They are where the family sits together after dinner, where financial discussions happen, where parents talk about school admissions and health issues, where arguments play out. The TV is on in the background during all of this. If the mic false-triggers during a conversation about your father’s medical reports or your EMI payments, a fragment of that conversation gets captured and uploaded. It probably sits in a log somewhere, unheard. But “probably” is not the same as “definitely,” and the information was never meant to leave the room.
To disable the mic on Android TV: go to Settings > Privacy > Microphone and flip the toggle off. On some models you will find it under Settings > Device Preferences > Privacy instead. A few higher-end TVs from Samsung and LG have a physical mute button either on the TV body or on the remote control. That physical switch is the better option because it disconnects the microphone at the hardware level, meaning no software update or background process can re-enable it without you flipping the switch back. If your TV has no convenient software toggle and no physical switch, a small piece of opaque tape over the microphone hole works perfectly well. It looks inelegant, but it is effective.
The same applies to cameras. Some premium TVs from Samsung and LG include cameras for video calls or gesture recognition. If you do not use either feature, cover the camera with a slider cover or tape. A piece of thick paper taped over the lens costs nothing and removes the risk entirely.
The reason this matters is that microphone and camera data are categorised differently from viewing data in most privacy policies. Viewing data is anonymised and aggregated (in theory). Audio and video can be personally identifiable. If a data breach hits the manufacturer and your voice clips or video footage leak, the consequences are far more personal than someone knowing you watched four hours of cooking shows on a Saturday.
Put Smart Devices on a Guest Network
Your TV is not the only device in the house that talks to external servers. Count what is connected to your Wi-Fi right now. The television, an Amazon Echo or Google Nest, maybe a security camera from Xiaomi or Tapo, a robot vacuum, a few smart bulbs, a smart plug or two. Every one of those devices maintains a connection to its manufacturer’s cloud servers. The vacuum maps your floor plan and uploads the layout. The camera streams footage to cloud storage. The smart plug logs when you switch the geyser on and off. Individually, none of these seem like a problem. But together, they form a surprisingly detailed portrait of how your household operates. When you wake up, when you leave for work, when you return, which rooms you spend time in, when the lights go off at night.
The privacy issue is one thing. The security issue is worse.
IoT devices are notorious for weak security. Default passwords that ship on the box and never get changed. Firmware that has not been updated since the day it left the factory. Unencrypted communication between the device and the server. In 2024, security researchers discovered that thousands of home cameras installed across India were accessible to anyone on the open internet because the owners had never changed the default login credentials. The usernames and passwords were “admin/admin” or “admin/12345” and they were listed in the product manual that anyone could download from the manufacturer’s website.
If one of these poorly secured devices is on the same Wi-Fi network as your laptop, phone, or NAS drive, a compromise of the cheap smart bulb can become a pathway to everything else on the network. An attacker who gets into the bulb can scan the local network, discover your other devices, and attempt to exploit them. Your laptop with your bank login saved in the browser. Your phone with your email open. The network-attached hard drive with your family photos and tax documents. All of it becomes reachable because it shares a network with a Rs 800 smart plug that has never received a security patch.
The fix is network isolation. Most home routers sold in India, including the ones provided by Jio Fiber, Airtel Xstream, ACT Fibernet, and BSNL Fiber, support creating a guest Wi-Fi network. Open a browser on your phone or laptop, go to your router’s admin page (usually 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1, and the exact address is printed on a sticker on the back or bottom of the router). Log in with the admin credentials (check the sticker for the default ones). Find the Guest Network section, enable it, give it a name like “HomeDevices” and a strong password, and then look for an option that says something like “Allow guests to access local network” or “Allow guests to see each other and access local resources” and make sure it is turned off.
Now reconnect every smart device to the guest network. TV, speakers, cameras, bulbs, vacuums, plugs. All of them. Keep your phones, laptops, tablets, and any device with sensitive data on the main network. The two networks share the same internet connection but cannot talk to each other. If a smart bulb gets hacked, the attacker is stranded on an isolated network with no route to your personal devices. Setup takes about twenty minutes and you only need to do it once.
While you are logged into the router admin panel, do two more things. First, change the admin password. If it is still the factory default, anyone who connects to your Wi-Fi can access the router settings and make changes. Second, check for a firmware update. Router manufacturers release patches for security vulnerabilities, and most people never install them because they do not know the option exists. An outdated router is one of the weakest points in a home network.
For people who want to take this one step further: change your router’s DNS settings to NextDNS or AdGuard DNS. Both services maintain blocklists of known tracking and advertising domains. When your smart TV tries to send viewing data to a tracking server, the DNS query gets blocked before any data leaves your home. NextDNS offers a free tier that handles up to 300,000 queries per month, which is more than enough for a typical Indian household. AdGuard DNS is completely free. You can configure either one by changing the DNS fields in your router settings to the IP addresses listed on their websites. It takes about five minutes and applies to every device on the network automatically.
Disable Tracking on Streaming Apps
You have dealt with the TV hardware. You have locked down the network. There is one more layer: the apps themselves.
Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar, JioCinema, SonyLIV, and every other streaming service you use tracks your behaviour within their app. What you search for, what you click on, how far into a show you get before you stop watching, whether you skip the intro, what time of day you tend to watch, what device you use. This is separate from the TV-level ACR tracking. Even if ACR is completely disabled, Netflix still knows exactly what you watch on Netflix. The data stays within their platform, but it feeds into recommendation algorithms and advertising models (for the ad-supported tiers). Some of it gets shared with measurement companies like Nielsen or Comscore.
You cannot turn all of this off. Streaming apps require some data collection to function. But you can reduce what they gather and what they do with it.
Netflix: Log into your account on a web browser. Go to Account > Privacy and data settings. You will see options for marketing communications and viewing activity. Turn off marketing emails and disable the “matched identifier communications” option, which is Netflix sharing your email with third parties for cross-platform ad matching. You can also request a copy of your data to see what they have collected, which is an instructive exercise. Netflix does not give you a full opt-out of viewing data collection because that data drives the recommendation engine, but reducing the marketing-side sharing is possible.
Amazon Prime Video: In the Prime Video app, go to Settings > Privacy. Turn off “Collect App Usage Data.” This does not stop Amazon from tracking what you watch (they consider that necessary for the service), but it reduces the ancillary data collection like how you interact with the interface. On your Amazon account page online, go to Manage Your Content and Devices > Preferences > Privacy Settings and review what is there. Amazon’s settings are scattered across multiple pages and they seem to reorganise them every few months, which is either poor design or a deliberate attempt to make opting out inconvenient. Either way, it takes patience.
Hotstar (now JioCinema after the merger complexities): Options here are more limited. You can manage notification preferences and email communications in the app settings, but viewing data collection does not have a user-facing off switch. If you are watching the ad-supported tier, your viewing patterns are being used for ad targeting and there is no way around that within the app. The only mitigation is the network-level DNS blocking mentioned in the previous section, which can catch some of the third-party tracking domains that the app pings.
YouTube (on smart TVs): YouTube is a Google product, so the tracking here ties into your broader Google account. On your phone or computer, go to myactivity.google.com and review the YouTube section. You can pause “YouTube History” which stops Google from using your watch history for recommendations and ad targeting. Be aware that pausing history also makes recommendations generic, so you lose the personalised home feed. If you are logged into a Google account on your TV’s YouTube app, consider logging out and using it without an account. You lose watch history sync across devices but you gain the absence of a persistent profile tied to your viewing.
JioCinema and SonyLIV: Both have minimal privacy controls within their apps. JioCinema is tightly linked to your Jio account, which means your viewing data can be combined with your Jio phone usage data, your JioFiber browsing data, and your JioMart shopping data to build a very thorough profile. There is no user-facing toggle to prevent this cross-linking. SonyLIV collects standard viewing metrics and shares aggregated data with advertising partners. In both cases, DNS-level blocking of third-party trackers is your best tool.
One thing that catches people off guard: if you use the smart TV’s built-in app store to download streaming apps, the TV manufacturer gets data about which apps you use and how often you open them, regardless of what happens inside the app. Samsung, LG, and Xiaomi all collect app usage telemetry on their platforms. You already turned off what you could in the first section of this guide. But app-level telemetry and TV-level telemetry are two separate streams, and both contribute to the overall profile that gets built about your household.
Does Your TV Even Need Internet?
This is worth sitting with for a moment.
If you use a Fire TV Stick, Chromecast, Apple TV, or any other streaming dongle plugged into the HDMI port, your television is really just a display panel. The smart TV’s own operating system becomes irrelevant. You are not using its apps, its recommendations, its interface. All the intelligence and all the connectivity are handled by the streaming device. The TV is just the screen.
In that scenario, the TV does not need to be connected to the internet at all. Pull the ethernet cable if it is wired. Go to Wi-Fi settings and forget the network. The TV becomes a dumb screen, and a dumb screen cannot collect data, cannot phone home, cannot be compromised remotely. It displays what you send to it through HDMI and does nothing else.
There are practical trade-offs. You will need to reconnect occasionally for firmware updates, which sometimes fix bugs or improve picture quality. Set a reminder to do it once every couple of months. Connect, update, disconnect. The rest of the time, the TV sits offline and silent.
If you do not have a streaming device and you rely on the TV’s built-in apps for everything, disconnecting is not practical. But the Fire TV Stick 4K costs around Rs 3,500 during sale season, and the Chromecast with Google TV runs about the same. For the price of a nice dinner, you get a device that handles all your streaming and lets you pull the TV off the internet entirely. It is not a bad trade.
The streaming device itself collects data too, of course. Amazon tracks what you watch on Fire TV, Google tracks what you watch on Chromecast. You are not eliminating tracking, you are consolidating it. Instead of both the TV manufacturer and the streaming platform tracking you, only the streaming platform does. And the streaming platform is where your account and preferences live anyway. Reducing the number of companies that have data about your viewing habits from two to one is a measurable improvement, even if it is not a total solution.
For people who want to go as far as possible: a Raspberry Pi 4 running LibreElec (a free media centre operating system) with a VPN gives you a streaming setup that sends almost no telemetry anywhere. You can install Kodi, add your media library, and stream from sources you control. The learning curve is steep and the experience is less polished than a commercial streaming device. But for the technically inclined, it is there.
A last thought on whether your TV even needs internet access at all. If you watch everything through a Fire TV Stick or Chromecast, the TV itself does not need to be connected. Pull the ethernet cable, forget the wifi password, and let the streaming device handle everything. The TV becomes a dumb screen. Sometimes dumb is better.
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