How your smart TV tracks you, and how to turn it off

Nearly every television sold today is a smart TV, and it needs an internet connection to run its streaming apps. To get that connection working, you accept terms and conditions during setup, and those terms typically give the manufacturer wide rights to collect and profit from your data. Most smart TVs then use something called Automatic Content Recognition, which takes snapshots of what's on screen and listens to audio, to work out what you're watching and build a profile that gets sold to advertisers.

This isn't a hack, a leak or a scandal at one particular brand. It's how the smart TV business model generally works, and it applies whether you paid £300 or £3,000 for the set.

What this actually means for you

Your TV can be building a picture of your viewing habits no matter where that viewing comes from, broadcast TV, a streaming app, a games console or a Blu-ray player. It does this by recognising what's on the screen, not just what app you opened. If your TV or its remote has a microphone for voice search, some models listen only when you press a button, others are always listening for a wake word. Either way, voice search requests can also feed into an advertising profile.

Separately, brands collect data on how you use the menus and features of the TV itself. This is generally used to improve the operating system rather than for advertising, and it's usually not something you can switch off completely.

During setup, the 'accept all' option is often made to look like the only sensible choice. It isn't. You can normally go through the individual toggles and decline the ones you don't want, rather than accepting everything in one go.

What to do

• Check your settings menu. LG, Samsung, Sony, Hisense, TCL, Panasonic (running Amazon Fire TV OS) and Sky all have menu options to turn off Automatic Content Recognition, ad or content personalisation, and voice recognition. The exact menu path varies by brand and sometimes by model or software version, so look for terms like 'ACR', 'viewing information services', 'interest-based advertising' or 'voice recognition'.
• Slow down at setup. When you first plug in a new TV, resist the 'accept all' prompt. Go through each option and turn off what you don't want before you start using the TV normally.
• Use the physical mic switch if your TV has one. Some Sony, Hisense, Panasonic and Sky Glass models include a physical switch to cut power to the microphone. If you'd rather not rely on a software setting, this gives you a harder guarantee that the mic is off.
• Sky customers should check their account, not just the TV. For Sky TVs, data sharing preferences are managed through your Sky account under the Data & Personalisation tab, rather than in the on-screen TV menu.
• Accept that some collection won't fully stop. Usage behaviour data, how you navigate menus and which features you use, generally can't be switched off, because it's used to run and improve the TV's own software.

What this does not fix

Turning off these settings reduces what your TV collects, but it doesn't remove all of it. The manufacturer will likely still gather some usage data about how you operate the TV itself, and that's not something most brands offer a full opt-out for.

This also isn't a security problem in the sense of your data being stolen or leaked. Nothing in this guidance suggests any TV brand has been caught misusing data or breaking any law. It's a description of how the industry generally operates, and the low prices of some TVs in recent years are likely connected to this data being a source of ongoing revenue for the manufacturer, long after you've paid for the set.

A VPN doesn't touch any of this either. It changes how your internet traffic looks to your broadband provider and to websites, but it has no way of reaching into your TV's own settings menu to stop ACR reading your screen or a microphone picking up your voice. If you want to reduce smart TV tracking, the settings menu is where that actually happens, not your network connection.