Smart TVs are spying on everyone

Smart TVs are watching their viewers and harvesting their data to benefit brokers using the same ad technology that denies privacy on the internet.

In a report titled "How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era," the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) outlines the expansive "commercial surveillance system" that has infested Smart TVs – aka connected TVs or CTVs – and video streaming services.

"The US CTV streaming business has deliberately incorporated many of the data-surveillance marketing practices that have long undermined privacy and consumer protection in the 'older' online world of social media, search engines, mobile phones and video services such as YouTube," the report [PDF] declares.

"Millions of Americans are being forced to accept unfair terms in order to access video programming, which threatens their privacy and may also narrow what information they access – including the quality of the content itself."

The report calls out the proliferation of FAST (Free Advertiser-Supported TV) channels like Tubi which, through its Tubi360 brand and content studio, "enables marketers to engage in enhanced product placement by incorporating their brands directly into programming content to target individual viewers."

It also catalogs various mechanisms used for profiling viewers and presenting them with personalized ads. These include: cookieless IDs; identity graphs that combine various IDs to link activity across devices and locations; automatic content recognition (ACR) software that analyzes what's on-screen; and AI-based ad targeting that "analyzes a scene's text, images, and sentiment, determines an emotional score, and then places ads with a similar emotional score."

CTV has become a privacy nightmare for viewers

"CTV has become a privacy nightmare for viewers," lamented Jeff Chester, executive director of CDD and co-author of the report, in a statement. "It is now a core asset for the vast system of digital surveillance that shapes most of our online experiences."

The CDD has presented its report to the US Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and California privacy regulators in the hope these watchdog agencies will do something about an issue that has been simmering for years.

The FTC, for example, held a Smart TV Workshop in 2016 to explore the issue. "In 2016, virtually all television delivery systems – smart TVs, streaming devices, game consoles, apps, and even old-fashioned set top boxes – track consumers' viewing habits, and sometimes in new and unexpected ways," the agency noted at the time.

The following year, the agency settled with CTV maker Vizio for $2.2 million over allegations that its smart TVs "capture second-by-second information". Info captured included videos viewed, which were allegedly matched to "specific demographic information to the viewing data, such as sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education level, home ownership, and household value." The combined data set is then sold to third parties for ad targeting.

Known problems

In 2021, at the FTC's PrivacyCon, academic researchers presented a paper [PDF] titled "The TV is Smart and Full of Trackers: Measuring Smart TV Advertising and Tracking." Among other findings, the researchers noted that some smart TV apps "send the advertising ID alongside static PII [personally identifiable information] values, effectively eliminating the user's ability to opt out of ad personalization."

So this is not exactly a new issue. And as is the case with social media privacy controls, consumers often don't understand how to limit CTV tracking to the extent that's actually possible.

In this hope that something will change after years of hand waving, CDD has written letters to officials at the FTC [PDF], FCC [PDF], the California Privacy Protection Agency [PDF], and California attorney-general Rob Bonta [PDF] to remind them that CTVs appear to flout privacy rules.

Asked if there's a reason the CDD expects its latest entreaty to prompt action from the regulators after almost a decade of concerns about CTVs, Chester told The Register that the various agencies responded very favorably.

"I do not believe they knew the extent of it," he replied. "Now they do. Besides, and as you know, CTV and adtech connected practices have mushroomed in the last three to four years. We are at a different place than in 2016."

Indeed, data brokers are spending increasing amounts on lobbying to dilute or derail privacy bills.

For its part, the FTC appears to be aware of the problem, having just last month issued its own report expressing concern about rampant data grabbing among social media and video streaming corporations.

Still, the US does not have a federal data privacy law – much less a plan to bring deep-pocketed data snoops and sellers to heel. ®