Before you click “Add to Cart” on today’s Toshiba 65-inch 4K Fire TV deal, there is one fact the listing does not mention: the “Toshiba” name on this television belongs to Hisense, a company majority-owned by the Chinese government — and Hisense is currently fighting a federal class-action lawsuit that alleges its smart TVs silently capture everything on your screen, every 500 milliseconds, and transmit that data to servers in China. That does not make the $249.99 Amazon price wrong. It does make it a decision, not just a deal.
[…]
Who Makes Toshiba TVs — and What That Means in 2026
Toshiba stopped manufacturing televisions in 2017, when it sold 95% of its television division — Toshiba Visual Solutions — to Hisense Group Co., Ltd. for approximately ¥12.9 billion (roughly $113 million). The “Toshiba” badge on the 65C350NU is a licensed brand name. The engineering, manufacturing, and technology come from Hisense.
Hisense Group is headquartered in Qingdao, China, and is majority-owned by the Qingdao State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) — a Chinese government holding entity. That ownership structure matters because of a legal framework that does not vary based on where the company’s US headquarters is located, what its privacy policy says, or where its servers sit.
China’s National Intelligence Law (2017), Article 7, requires that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law.” A December 2020 advisory from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated explicitly that PRC laws compel firms operating under their jurisdiction to secretly cooperate with Chinese security and intelligence services — potentially including installing backdoors or turning over data on request, even if that request is illegal under the jurisdiction in which these firms operate. This obligation is not a contested interpretation — it is the plain text of the law, confirmed by the DHS and cited in multiple U.S. government security bulletins since 2017.
For a television that sits in your living room and runs software that tracks what plays on screen around the clock, that legal context is relevant.
The Lawsuit Already Filed Against This Brand’s TVs
On May 12, 2026, attorneys with the firm Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise filed a federal class-action complaint against Hisense USA Corporation in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint names 14 legal claims, including violations of the Video Privacy Protection Act, the Federal Wiretap Act, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, and the Bulk Sensitive Data Transfer Rule — a Department of Justice regulation that took effect April 8, 2025, and restricts the transfer of Americans’ bulk sensitive data to “countries of concern,” a list that includes China.
The complaint alleges that Hisense’s Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology captures images and audio from the television screen as often as every 500 milliseconds across all inputs — not just streaming apps, but cable boxes, gaming consoles, and any device connected via HDMI. According to the filing, those fingerprints are linked to persistent device, household, and cross-device identifiers and redistributed to advertising-technology, data-broker, and measurement partners. The complaint names the alleged recipients of this data as Hisense’s state-owned parent company in China.
The California complaint followed a Texas Attorney General enforcement action filed December 15, 2025. Texas AG Ken Paxton obtained a temporary restraining order against Hisense, prohibiting the company from collecting, using, selling, sharing, or transferring ACR data on Texas residents while the case proceeds. The filing characterized the devices as “mass surveillance systems.”
Neither lawsuit has resulted in a judgment. Hisense has not issued a public admission of wrongdoing — a spokesperson stated that the company “stands by the high quality of its products and respecting customers’ privacy.” Both cases remain active.
[…]
Full Story: Tech Times July 18 2026
