#Internet icon cast software#
#Internet icon cast Pc#
#Internet icon cast tv#

If the TV is plugged into your network via an Ethernet cable, unplug it. To do so, just cut off your smart TV’s internet connection.

#Internet icon cast software#

But honestly, what’s the point? Why not just prevent the smart TV software from phoning home in the first place? We could go on about other “features” you might not like, like the interactive advertisements Roku sometimes slips into cable TV programs. Just Disconnect Your Smart TV and Be Done with It RELATED: The Smart TV Crapware Era Has Already BegunĬonsumer Reports has a good guide to turning off ACR and other snooping features on smart TVs from a wide variety of brands. Roku makes its money from ads and paid video content, not from selling hardware. Of course, Vizio never admitted that it did anything wrong.įinally, let’s face it: Smart TVs are cheaper than dumb TVs because of this data collection. Case in point: Vizio paid out a $17 million settlement after it was sued for making these options confusing and misleading. TV manufacturers are only getting away with this by making ACR-related options confusing and buried, counting on TV customers not knowing that their televisions are even capable of this. We’re sure that all those Roku TV users out there understand exactly what this option does, right? The majority of Roku TV users all really want marketers to know exactly what they’re watching at all times. All the people who have this feature enabled on their TVs are surely informed consumers making an informed decision to share their data with marketers.įor example, on a Roku smart TV, you have to head to Settings > Privacy > Smart TV Experience and disable “From TV Inputs” to deactivate ACR features.

Of course, this monitoring isn’t happening against anyone’s will! That would be unethical. “You Are in Control!” Ana Blazic Pavlovic/. That data can then be used to build a more complete profile on you and your TV habits to better serve you targeted ads. These could include your web browsing history, search history, product purchases, and credit card transaction data. In other words, data about what you’re doing on your TV is combined with other sources of data. What do the marketers do with this data? As AdExchanger puts it: “Once the data has been collected, TV analytics companies ingest ACR data and combine it with other data sets to make it more accurate and usable.”

#Internet icon cast Pc#

To do so, your smart TV will capture sections of video, snippets of audio, still images, or some combination of the three, and upload the data to a “listening post,” as AdExchanger’s guide for marketers explains it.Įven if you never touch your smart TV’s software and you just play video games from a console, stream with an Apple TV, or connect a PC via HDMI, your smart TV is likely watching and phoning home. When this feature is enabled-and it’s probably enabled by default, or after a prompt that really encourages you to enable it without explaining it properly-your smart TV will monitor your watching habits and home phone.