A new class action lawsuit accuses Chinese electronics manufacturer Hisense of secretly harvesting viewing data and personal information from millions of American households through its smart televisions.
The lawsuit, filed May 12 in federal court in San Francisco, alleges that Hisense embedded surveillance-style tracking technology into its smart TVs that allowed the company to monitor what users watched and collect detailed information about their behavior inside their homes.
The suit was brought by the law firm Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise against Hisense USA Corporation, the American subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned electronics giant. Plaintiffs claim the company’s televisions contain automatic content recognition, or ACR, technology capable of continuously capturing screen activity and linking it to household and device identifiers.
According to the complaint, the technology allegedly records “every sound and image displayed on the screen as often as every 500 milliseconds” and distributes the information to advertising firms, data brokers, and affiliated Chinese entities.
The lawsuit further alleges that data gathered by Hisense could ultimately be accessible to the Chinese Communist government because Chinese law requires companies to cooperate with state intelligence demands.
“Hisense’s Smart TVs sit in millions of American living rooms, including the homes of military servicemembers, intelligence-community personnel, judges, elected officials, journalists and dissidents,” the plaintiffs stated in the filing.
The legal action builds on an earlier enforcement effort by Ken Paxton, who sued Hisense and several other major electronics manufacturers earlier this year over similar allegations involving unauthorized consumer surveillance. In addition to Hisense, Paxton’s lawsuits targeted Sony, Samsung, LG, and TCL Technology.
Paxton previously secured a temporary restraining order barring Hisense from collecting, sharing, or selling data obtained through the televisions’ ACR systems.
The new lawsuit argues that additional legal action is necessary to compensate consumers and permanently halt the alleged practices nationwide.
“Plaintiffs and Class Members in California (and across the United States) deserve no less protection,” the complaint states.
The plaintiffs, who purchased Hisense smart TVs for personal and family use, say they never consented to the alleged collection and sharing of their viewing habits and household data. They accuse the company of violating federal and California privacy and surveillance laws.
The lawsuit seeks a court order preventing further data collection and requests unspecified financial damages, including punitive damages.
