Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit on Monday against Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, and Hisense, claiming in a press release that they "have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (“ACR”) technology.”
Paxton goes on to label ACR as “an uninvited, invisible digital invader,” and in one of the five separately filed suits, he calls Samsung TVs “a mass surveillance system.”
I personally submitted Hisense’s ACR servers to a popular DNS adblock list that’s used by a lot of products.
And just like that, anyone with a VIDAA TV hiding behind a pi-hole went dark.
We should really make sure every TV gets checked.
I wonder how long it will take until they all start using DoH and conveniently make the TV fail if it’s blocked…
You’d have to block whatever DoH server it’s using. They usually fall back to regular DNS. I’ve found that a Chromecast will use Google DNS, but will fall back to LAN DNS when blocked.