Texas says your TV takes a picture of your screen twice a second. That's probably why your phone keeps showing you ads for stuff you only ever watched on the TV. The state sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over it last December. The tech is called automatic content recognition, or ACR. Every half second, the TV grabs whatever is on the screen, turns it into a fingerprint, and matches it against a giant library of shows and commercials. It doesn't care where the picture comes from. Cable, your PS5, the laptop you plugged in over HDMI to show your parents vacation photos all get read the same way. Getting that onto your phone is the clever part, and it runs through your Wi-Fi. Your TV and your phone share the same internet connection, so to an ad company they look like they live in the same house, because they do. The New York Times dug into one of these companies, Samba TV, back in 2018. Its software was on 13.5 million smart TVs, and the company said 90% of owners opted in during setup. Advertisers could pay to follow a commercial you saw on TV with an ad on every other device in your home. So you watch a travel show about Lisbon on Sunday night, and by Monday morning Instagram is showing you flights to Portugal. Your TV saw the show, and your router told the ad company whose phone to send it to. The guy who posted this dump had to break into his own TV just to see any of it. The firmware on his 2025 Samsung was encrypted, so he copied the files straight off the running TV onto his Mac. Inside, it looks like a laptop. There's a web browser engine, an app loader built on Microsoft's .NET, a section for DRM, and a long list of background services that check in every time the TV boots. You bought a computer you'd need hacking skills to look inside. Samsung settled with Texas in February. It didn't admit to anything and still says its TVs don't spy on people. The deal means Texans get a clear consent screen before ACR turns on, and it only covers Texas. Before the settlement, a Texas court said there was good reason to believe that reading Samsung's privacy disclosures took more than 200 clicks across four or more menus. Samsung got out of the case without paying a single dollar.