Did you know your smart TV may be taking snapshots of what you watch? Want to investigate what happens to that information? Northeastern University and SPHERE are hosting a Smart TV ACR Hackathon October 19-20 in Boston, with online participation available around the world. More details and registration are available here.

Modern smart TVs collect a wide range of data and use technologies such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which samples what is displayed on the screen and matches it against a catalog to identify the content being watched. The resulting information can be sent to remote servers and used for purposes including audience measurement, targeted advertising, and profiling.

The Smart TV ACR Hackathon invites researchers, students, technologists, and privacy enthusiasts to investigate how these systems actually behave.

The investigation will use smart TVs in SPHERE’s IoT cluster at Northeastern University. SPHERE enables hackathon participants to remotely conduct controlled, reproducible experiments with the TVs and observe their behavior.

The goal of the hackathon is to build reproducible experiments and evidence that can help uncover when ACR activates, what information it transmits, and under what conditions it operates. By better documenting these behaviors, participants can contribute to a deeper understanding of smart TV privacy and support the broader research and consumer-advocacy community.

Event Details

Date: October 19-20, 2026
Location: Northeastern University, Boston, MA, and online
Early Registration Deadline: October 4, 2026
Final Registration Deadline: October 15, 2026

Visit the Smart TV ACR Hackathon website to learn more and register.