Watching TV with the Second-Party

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2409.06203 (cs) [Submitted on 10 Sep 2024] Title:Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs Authors:Gianluca Anselmi, Yash Vekaria, Alexander D'Souza, Patricia Callejo, Anna Maria Mandalari, Zubair Shafiq View a PDF of the paper titled Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs, by Gianluca Anselmi and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Smart TVs implement a unique tracking approach called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) to profile viewing activity of their users. ACR is a Shazam-like technology that works by periodically capturing the content displayed on a TV's screen and matching it against a content library to detect what content is being displayed at any given point in time. While prior research has investigated third-party tracking in the smart TV ecosystem, it has not looked into second-party ACR tracking that is directly conducted by the smart TV platform. In this work, we conduct a black-box audit of ACR network traffic between ACR clients on the smart TV and ACR servers. We use our auditing approach to systematically investigate whether (1) ACR tracking is agnostic to how a user watches TV (e.g., linear vs. streaming vs. HDMI), (2) privacy controls offered by smart TVs have an impact on ACR tracking, and (3) there are any differences in ACR tracking between the UK and the US. We perform a series of experiments on two major smart TV platforms: Samsung and LG. Our results show that ACR works even when the smart TV is used as a "dumb" external display, opting-out stops network traffic to ACR servers, and there are differences in how ACR works across the UK and the US. Comments: In Proceedings of the 24th ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2024 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) ACM classes: K.4.1; H.3.1 Cite as: arXiv:2409.06203 [cs.CR] (or arXiv:2409.06203v1 [cs.CR] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2409.06203 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Yash Vekaria [view email] [v1] Tue, 10 Sep 2024 04:15:39 UTC (4,397 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs, by Gianluca Anselmi and 4 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev | next > new | recent | 2024-09 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY cs.NI References & Citations NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code…

This excerpt is published under fair use for community discussion. Read the full article at arXiv.org.