alt Hacker News> "LG also said that its features like “Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional,” and “not enabled by default.”
I am absolutely certain that ACR was enabled on our new TV by default, back some years ago. I am nearly certain their voice recognition, and advertising spying were enabled on our TV by default.
If none of this is truly "enabled by default" then this is a recent development.
I discovered this many years ago and did some deep dives, and unfortunately didn't publish anything about it. Lesson learned.
A few months ago, my Roku TV started displaying these weird popups, saying something like, "Looks like you're watching college basketball. Did you know Roku-TV also has college basketball?" - something like that. Well, for the Roku device, yes, there was a setting I could disable, but (1) Roku pushed this 'feature' and made it default without my knowledge/consent, and (2) the config setting says the popups will stop, but it doesn't mention the data collection; my assumption is they're still collecting that data for their own data analytics purposes.