[…]Your TV wants your data
The TV business traditionally included three distinct entities. There’s the hardware, namely the TV itself; the entertainment, like movies and shows; and the ads, usually just commercials that interrupt your movies and shows. In the streaming era, tech companies want to control all three, a setup also known as vertical integration. If, say, Roku makes the TV, supplies the content, and sells the ads, then it stands to control the experience, set the rates, and make the most money. That’s business!
Roku has done this very well. Although it was founded in 2002, Roku broke into the market in 2008 after Netflix invested $6 million in the company to make a set-top box that enabled any TV to stream Netflix content. It was literally called the Netflix Player by Roku. Over the course of the next 15 years, Roku would grow its hardware business to include streaming sticks, which are basically just smaller set-top-boxes; wireless soundbars, speakers, and subwoofers; and after licensing its operating system to third-party TV makers, its own affordable, Roku-branded smart TVs
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The shift toward ad-supported everything has been happening across the TV landscape. People buy new TVs less frequently these days, so TV makers want to make money off the TVs they’ve already sold. Samsung has Samsung Ads, LG has LG Ad Solutions, Vizio has Vizio Ads, and so on and so forth. Tech companies, notably Amazon and Google, have gotten into the mix too, not only making software and hardware for TVs but also leveraging the massive amount of data they have on their users to sell ads on their TV platforms. These companies also sell data to advertisers and data brokers, all in the interest of knowing as much about you as possible in the interest of targeting you more effectively. It could even be used to train AI.
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Is it possible to escape the ads?
Breaking free from this ad prison is tough. Most TVs on the market today come with a technology called automatic content recognition (ACR) built in. This is basically Shazam for TV — Shazam itself helped popularize the tech — and gives smart TV platforms the ability to monitor what you’re watching by either taking screenshots or capturing audio snippets while you’re watching. (This happens at the signal level, not from actual microphone recordings from the TV.)
Advertisers and TV companies use ACR tech to collect data about your habits that are otherwise hard to track, like if you watch live TV with an antenna. They use that data to build out a profile of you in order to better target ads. ACR also works with devices, like gaming consoles, that you plug into your TV through HDMI cables.
Yash Vekaria, a PhD candidate at UC Davis, called the HDMI spying “the most egregious thing we found” in his research for a paper published last year on how ACR technology works. And I have to admit that I had not heard of ACR until I came across Vekaria’s research.
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Unfortunately, you don’t have much of a choice when it comes to ACR on your TV. You probably enabled the technology when you first set up your TV and accepted its privacy policy. If you refuse to do this, a lot of the functions on your TV won’t work. You can also accept the policy and then disable ACR on your TV’s settings, but that could disable certain features too. In 2017, Vizio settled a class-action lawsuit for tracking users by default. If you want to turn off this tracking technology, here’s a good guide from Consumer Reports that explains how for most types of smart TVs.
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it does bug me, just on principle, that I have to let a tech company wiretap my TV in order to enjoy all of the device’s features.
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Source: Roku’s Moana 2 controversy is part of a bigger ad problem | Vox
Robin Edgar
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