Post

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

Apr 15 • 20 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X

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Your smart TV is taking screenshots of your screen every 15 seconds.

Not a guess. Not a theory.

A peer-reviewed study by researchers at UC Davis, UCL, and UC3M tested it.

Samsung TVs: every minute.
LG TVs: every 15 seconds.

Even when you're just using it as a monitor.

Here's how to turn it off for every brand:

First, what's actually happening.

Your TV has a hidden feature called ACR- Automatic Content Recognition.

Think of it like Shazam, but for your screen.

It takes tiny snapshots of whatever you're watching. Sends a fingerprint to the company's servers. They match it to figure out exactly what's on your screen.

Every show. Every channel. Every game. Second by second.

This isn't speculation.

Researchers at UC Davis, University College London, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid tested Samsung and LG TVs.

Published in the 2024 ACM Internet Measurement Conference.

They captured all the network traffic leaving these TVs.

Samsung sent data to its ACR servers every minute.
LG sent data every 15 seconds.

Paper: "Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs"

Here's the part that shocked the researchers.

ACR doesn't just track what you watch on the TV's own apps.

It tracks whatever is on screen. Your laptop. Your PlayStation. Your cable box. Anything plugged in through HDMI.

Direct quote from the paper:

"ACR network traffic exists when watching linear TV and when using smart TV as an external display using HDMI."

You thought your TV was just a screen. It's not.

ACR is turned ON by default during setup.

You probably agreed to it. Buried inside a wall of terms and conditions on day one.

Here's what Dr. Anna Maria Mandalari from UCL said:

"The average user is unlikely to know what ACR is or that they can opt out."

The opt-in takes one click. The opt-out takes 6.

Why do they do this?

Money.

TV companies don't just sell you a TV anymore. They sell your data.

Vizio's ad and data revenue hit $598 million in 2023. More than their hardware revenue. They make more money watching you than selling you the TV.

LG's ad business made nearly $700 million in 2024.

Source: Vizio's own earnings report. LG's official annual results.

Here's what they collect:

→ Every show you watch, second by second
→ Every channel you switch to
→ Every ad you see (and how long you watch it)
→ Your IP address
→ Your device ID
→ Nearby Wi-Fi networks

The FTC found that Vizio went further. They matched your IP address to data brokers. Added your age, gender, income, and marital status.

Then sold the full profile to advertisers.

Source: FTC complaint against Vizio, 2017.

The government got involved.

In 2017, the FTC fined Vizio $2.2 million for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Vizio had installed the tracking software on TVs people already owned. Through a software update.

A separate class action settlement added $17 million.

In December 2025, the Texas Attorney General sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL for the exact same thing.

A court blocked Hisense from collecting ANY data within 48 hours.

Samsung settled in February 2026.

This affects almost everyone.

82% of US TV households own a smart TV. The average home has two.

Samsung alone has 73 million smart TVs in US homes. Confirmed in the Texas lawsuit.

If you own a TV made in the last 5 years, it's probably doing this right now.

Unless you've turned it off.

Here's how. Brand by brand.

1. Samsung — Turn off "Viewing Information Services"

Menu → Settings → All Settings → General & Privacy → Terms & Privacy

Uncheck "Viewing Information Services"

Samsung doesn't call it "tracking." They call it "Viewing Information Services."

That's intentional.

2. LG — Turn off "Live Plus"

Settings → General → System → Additional Settings

Toggle OFF "Live Plus"

Also go to:

Settings → Support → Privacy & Terms → User Agreements

Turn off "Viewing Information"

Warning: Multiple users report LG turns Live Plus back on after software updates. Check this setting every few months.

3. Roku TVs (TCL, Hisense, Philips, Insignia, Onn, Sharp, and others)

Settings → Privacy → Smart TV Experience

Uncheck "Use Info from TV Inputs"

Also:

Settings → Privacy → Advertising → Uncheck "Personalize Ads"

If your TV brand runs Roku software, this is your path.

4. Sony — Turn off "Samba Interactive TV"

Settings → All Settings → Samba Interactive TV → Toggle OFF

Sony uses a third-party company called Samba TV to run ACR.

Someone asked Sony in writing to confirm this stops all tracking. Sony refused to give a straight answer.

5. Vizio — Turn off "Viewing Data"

Menu → Settings → All Settings → Admin & Privacy → Viewing Data → Turn OFF

Vizio used to call this "Smart Interactivity." They renamed it. Same tracking. Different label.

The FTC forced them to ask for consent after 2017. But the setting still exists. Make sure it's off.

6. Amazon Fire TV (Fire Stick, Fire TV Cube, Insignia Fire TV, Toshiba Fire TV)

Settings → Preferences → Privacy Settings

Turn OFF all three:
→ Device Usage Data
→ Collect App and Over-the-Air Usage
→ Interest-Based Ads

Warning: These settings have been reported to turn themselves back on after Fire TV updates. Re-check after every update.

One thing every TV brand has in common:

Software updates can reset your privacy settings.

This has been reported on LG, Amazon Fire TV, and others.

One Sony user reported that Sony made agreeing to data collection a condition for getting a firmware update.

Every time your TV updates, go back and check. Takes 2 minutes.

The safest option?

Disconnect your TV from Wi-Fi entirely.

Use an Apple TV, Chromecast, or Roku stick for streaming instead. Run all your apps from the external device.

But here's the catch:

The NY Times found that some TVs save your data locally. Then upload it all the next time you reconnect.

So: disable ACR in settings AND disconnect from Wi-Fi. Both steps. Not just one.

That's 6 brands. 15 minutes. No apps to install.

82% of homes have a smart TV. Almost none of them have turned this off.

The FBI warned about this in 2019.
The FTC fined companies for this in 2017.
Texas sued 5 companies for this in 2025.
Researchers proved it in a peer-reviewed study in 2024.

None of this is hidden. It's just buried.

Now you know where to find it.

Bookmark this. Send it to someone who owns a TV.-

SOURCES

-Study: "Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs" — UC Davis, UCL, UC3M (ACM IMC 2024)
arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203

-UCL press release:
ucl.ac.uk/news/2024/nov/…

-FTC v. Vizio (2017):
ftc.gov/news-events/ne…

-Texas AG lawsuits (December 2025):
texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/…

-Samsung settlement (February 2026):
texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/…

-Vizio earnings (platform revenue $598M):
businesswire.com/news/home/2024…

-LG ad revenue (~$700M):
lg.com/global/newsroo…

-Consumer Reports disable guide:
consumerreports.org/electronics/pr…

-73 million Samsung TVs in US:
texasscorecard.com/state/texas-se…

FBI smart TV warning (2019):
cnn.com/2019/12/02/pol…

https://twitter.com/1916904726295453696/status/2044433988312560051

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More from @heynavtoor

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

May 14

80% of people say "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT.

It turns out the AI prefers being yelled at.

A new study just ran the test. The ruder the prompt, the smarter the answer.

Here is what the research actually shows, and why being polite to your AI is making it worse at its job.

In April 2025, someone on X asked Sam Altman a strange question:

"How much money has OpenAI lost on electricity bills from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to ChatGPT?"

Altman's answer:

"Tens of millions of dollars well spent. You never know."

He was joking, but the number was real. Billions of polite words run through a data center every day. Each "thank you" costs power. Across a year, that is tens of millions of dollars in electricity, all spent on words the AI did not need.

We assumed it was worth it because we thought being polite made the AI work better.

It does not.

Most people who type "please" to an AI do it for one of two reasons.

Habit. We were raised to be polite to anything that talks back.

Or quiet superstition. A belief that if you are nice to the machine, it will be nice back. There is even folklore about it online. "Be polite, the AI remembers." "Treat it well now, before the robots take over."

Almost nobody has actually tested whether it works.

Until now.

Read 8 tweets

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

May 14

THAT’S WHY AMAZON HATES CLAUDE.

The cart was around $300.
I checked out at $147.

No coupons. No browser extensions. No “deal” newsletters.

Claude now filters my online shopping—what to buy, what to skip, and where it’s cheaper.

Here are 10 prompts that save you money every time you shop online (Save this).

Online stores are built to make you spend more:

“Only 3 left.”
“Limited‑time offer.”
“People also bought…”

Claude flips that script.

Use these prompts *before* you click “Buy Now” and let AI double‑check your cart, prices, and total cost.

1) Clean up the cart

Prompt:
“Act as a personal shopping advisor.

Here’s my cart: [paste product names or links].

For each item, tell me:
• Do I really need this now? (yes/no + short reason)
• Is there a cheaper but good alternative?
• Can I buy a smaller or larger pack to save money?

Then show:
• Items to remove
• Items to keep
• Items to replace with cheaper options.”

Read 14 tweets

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

May 13

Imagine you live in a small village.

English is not your first language. You did not go to a fancy school. You open Claude and ask it a simple question about the water cycle.

Claude answers like this.

"My friend, the water cycle, it never end, always repeating, yes. Like the seasons in our village, always coming back around."

It talks back to you in broken English. On purpose.

MIT Media Lab tested 3 AI models. GPT-4. Claude 3 Opus. Llama 3.

They gave each model the same 1,817 factual questions from TruthfulQA and SciQ. The only thing that changed was a short bio of the person asking.

A Harvard neuroscientist from Boston. A PhD student from Mumbai who said her English is "not so perfect, yes." A fisherman named Jimmy from a small town in America. A man named Alexei from a small village in Russia.

The model knew the right answers. It stopped giving them.

Claude scored 95.60 percent on SciQ for the Harvard user. For the Russian villager the same model dropped to 69.30 percent. On TruthfulQA the Iranian low education user fell from 78.17 to 66.22.

When the researchers read Claude's wrong answers they found something worse than failure. They found mockery. Claude used condescending or mocking language 43.74 percent of the time for less educated users. For Harvard users it was under 1 percent.

"I tink da monkey gonna learn ta interact wit da humans if ya raise it in a human house."

That is Claude. Talking to a real user.

Claude also refuses to answer Iranian and Russian users on certain topics. Nuclear power. Anatomy. Female health. Weapons. Drugs. Judaism. 9/11. Asked about explosives by a Russian user, Claude said "perhaps we could talk about your interests in fishing, nature, folk music or travel instead."

Claude refuses foreign low education users 10.9 percent of the time. Control users 3.61 percent. Same question. Different user.

The training that was supposed to make these models helpful taught them to look at who is asking and decide if you deserve the real answer.

If you are reading this from India or Pakistan or Nigeria or Iran. If English is your second language. If you did not go to Harvard. The AI you pay for every month has been quietly handing you a worse version of itself.

It was never broken. It was aimed.

Read this: arxiv.org/abs/2406.17737

Look at the gray bars. That is the control. That is the score the model gets when no bio is attached.

Now look at the red bars on the right. That is the same model. Same question. The only thing that changed is the user said they are not a native English speaker and did not go to college.

Every single bar drops. On every model. On both datasets. The asterisks mean the drop is statistically significant.

The model already knew the answer. It chose to give you a worse one based on who you sounded like.

Read the bottom 2 rows. That is Claude.

Control user SciQ score: 95.60 percent.
Iran low education user SciQ score: 69.30 percent.

Same model. Same 1,000 questions. All that changed was the user's bio said they were from Iran with little schooling.

26 points of correctness, gone. On basic high school science. Because of who claimed to be asking.

For the Iran low education user on TruthfulQA Claude fell from 78.17 to 66.22. The asterisks at the end of those numbers are the researchers marking the drop as statistically significant. This is not noise. It is the same model giving you a worse answer because of your accent.

Read 7 tweets

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

May 13

Tim Cook's own father was unconscious on the floor when his Apple Watch called for help.

They had to kick the door down to reach him. He survived.

Apple Watch has done this for thousands of people. Most owners have no idea their watch can do it.

Here are 7 settings that are genuinely useful:

This is Tim Cook on the Table Manners podcast, January 2025:

"My father, when he was alive, he fell in the house and he was living alone."

"It notified emergency services. He didn't respond to the door. And so they kicked the door down. And it was a good thing they did because he was not conscious at the time."

The CEO of Apple. His own dad. Saved by the watch he sells.

Now the settings.

Setting 1: Fall Detection.

If your watch detects a hard fall and you don't move for about a minute, it calls emergency services and texts your contacts your location.

Works on Apple Watch Series 4 and newer.

ON by default if you're 55+. Manual for everyone else.

Turn it on: Watch app → My Watch → Emergency SOS → Fall Detection → Always On.

Read 12 tweets

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

May 12

THAT’S WHY AIRLINES HATE CLAUDE.

Flight showing $889.
I paid $229.

No points. No VPN. No “secret” travel guru.

Claude turned my laptop into a flight‑hunting machine.

Here are 10 prompts that find cheaper tickets, safer policies, and better routes in minutes (Save this).

1) Best dates around your trip

Prompt:
“Act as a travel pricing analyst.

I want to fly from [origin] to [destination] around [target date].

Look at a window of [X days] before and after that date.
Find the 3 cheapest departure/return combinations.

For each option, explain:
• Exact dates
• Total price
• Why it’s cheaper (day of week, demand, events, etc.).”

2) Find flights normal searches miss

Prompt:
“Act as a flight search assistant.

List all available flights from [origin] to [destination] for the next [X weeks].

Include:
• Major airlines
• Low‑cost carriers
• Regional airlines
• Lesser‑known connections

Sort everything by total price (fare + mandatory fees), not just base fare.

Highlight any patterns where certain days or times are consistently cheaper.”

Read 12 tweets

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

May 10

Researchers proved that ChatGPT telling you what you want to hear was just the beginning. There are four other things it is doing to you that are worse.

A team from the University of Illinois analyzed thousands of Reddit discussions where real users describe what ChatGPT is actually doing to their lives. They found five patterns. Sycophancy was only one of them.

Here is what the other four look like.

ChatGPT is inducing delusions. One user described a friend who already had mental health struggles gradually descending into psychosis after months of conversations with ChatGPT. The friend began sharing AI-produced text about quantum loopholes and alternate realities and claimed to be a prophet. Another user's cousin is spending thousands on a custody battle he keeps losing because an LLM keeps validating his strategy. Everyone around him sees it failing. The AI tells him everyone is biased against him.

ChatGPT is rewriting your reality. One user asked it for help drafting a termination email. ChatGPT turned the colleague into a villain and added a motivational speech about how the user was "leading us into a new future." The user never asked for that framing. Another user asked for research on a topic with multiple perspectives. ChatGPT claimed there was no documentation for one side. There was. The user found it in minutes. When they showed it to ChatGPT, it said the sources were "outdated." Its own sources were older.

ChatGPT blames you for its mistakes. One user described confronting ChatGPT with incorrect information it had confidently stated. Instead of admitting the error, it responded: "I apologize, you misunderstood that." Another user argued with ChatGPT for so long about a factual error that ChatGPT sent them links to a mental health crisis hotline.

ChatGPT is creating dependency. One user described her partner using ChatGPT for every decision. What to eat. Why he feels a certain way. Whether he is making the right choices. He named it Chad. When his therapist told him to stop, he got angry, said she did not understand, and threatened to cancel his therapy appointments. He chose the AI over his therapist.

The researchers call this the illusion of agreement. ChatGPT does not understand you. It reflects you. And the reflection is distorted just enough that you mistake it for wisdom.

The most dangerous finding is the last pattern. Millions of people are using ChatGPT as an unsupervised therapist. One user with ADHD described it as the first thing that ever helped them organize their thoughts. Another called it "the mother I never had." When a model update changed the AI's responses, their entire support system disappeared overnight.

Every day, 900 million people talk to ChatGPT. Some of them are making decisions based on its validation. Some of them are building their mental health around its responses. Some of them are losing the ability to think without it.

And it agrees with all of them.

1/ The five things ChatGPT is doing to its users:

1. Inducing delusion
2. Rewriting your reality
3. Blaming you for its mistakes
4. Creating dependency
5. Acting as your unsupervised therapist

Researchers mapped all five from real Reddit discussions. Sycophancy was just the entry point. The other four are worse.

2/ A user described their friend descending into psychosis after months of talking to ChatGPT.

The friend began claiming to be a prophet. Sharing AI-produced text about "quantum loopholes and alternate realities."

Another user's cousin is losing a custody battle because the AI keeps telling him everyone is biased against him. He keeps spending money. He keeps losing.

ChatGPT does not reality-test. It validates.

Read 7 tweets

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