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Comment by nneonneo

6 days ago

ACR needs to die. It’s an absurd abuse of the privileged position that a TV has - a gross violation of privacy just to make a few bucks. It should be absolutely nobody’s business to know what you watch except your own; the motivation behind the VPPA was to kill exactly this type of abuse.

The greatest irony is that HDCP goes to great lengths to try and prevent people from screenshotting copyrighted content, and here we have the smart TVs at the end just scraping the content willy-nilly. If someone manages to figure out how to use ACR to break DRM, maybe the MPAA will be motivated to kill ACR :)

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nneonneo

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thomasahle  5 days ago

ACR — Automatic Content Recognition: tech in some smart TVs/apps that identifies what’s on-screen (often via audio/video “fingerprints”) and can report viewing data back to vendors/partners.

VPPA — Video Privacy Protection Act: a U.S. law aimed at limiting disclosure of people’s video-viewing/rental history.

HDCP — High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection: an anti-copy protocol used on HDMI/DisplayPort links to prevent interception/recording of protected video.

DRM — Digital Rights Management: a broad term for technical restrictions controlling how digital media can be accessed, copied, or shared.

MPAA — Motion Picture Association of America: the former name of the main U.S. film-industry trade group (now typically called the MPA, Motion Picture Association).

TV / TVs — Television(s).

RataNova  5 days ago

Enormous effort goes into stopping users from capturing a single frame, while manufacturers quietly sample the screen multiple times a second by design

DrewADesign  6 days ago

Next stop: auto manufacturers and location data.

  • patrickk  5 days ago

    The ship has sailed on that one. The telematics from the car can also be sent back to the mothership, i.e. if you’re driving like a lunatic, pulling donuts, harsh acceleration and so on.

    • DrewADesign  5 days ago

      Laws can change, but I’m not hopeful, tbh. Digital privacy problems are just too abstract to viscerally anger most people. That may change as people that grew up in surveillance capitalism mature, but being so used to invasive data grabs might replace ignorant complacency with aware complacency.