Your television is debuting the latest, most captivating program: You.

In a report titled “How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era,” the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) spotlighted a massive data-driven surveillance apparatus that ensnares the public through modern television sets.

“The widespread technological and business developments that have taken place during the last five years have created a connected television media and marketing system with unprecedented capabilities for surveillance and manipulation.”

In cooperation with data brokers, streaming video programming networks, Connected Television (CTV) device companies, and smart TV manufacturers are creating detailed digital dossiers about viewers, based on a person’s identity information, viewing choices, purchasing patterns, and thousands of online and offline behaviors.

Because of their findings, the CDD has called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and California Regulators to investigate connected TV practices.

The report provides a detailed overview of all the different ways in which streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in ways that are severe privacy infringements.

Earlier, we read a paper by researchers of the Cornell University about a tracking approach called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR). ACR is a technology that periodically captures the content displayed on a TV’s screen and matches it against a content library to detect what content is being displayed at any given point in time.

The researchers found that ACR is functional even when the smart TV is used as a “dumb” external display. There are two types of ACR fingerprinting: one to process acoustic (ACR audio) media, and one for video content (ACR Video).

Brands utilize ACR TV for multiple reasons. The most obvious are frequency optimization, unique reach abilities, and improved targeting. With the advent of CTV, more and more people are opting out of cable television, which opens the opportunity of more targeted advertising to reach a specific audience.

Free Advertiser-Supported TV (FAST channels) such as Tubi, Pluto TV, and many others are commonplace, and present advertisers with a key opportunity to monetize viewer data and target them with sophisticated new forms of interactive marketing.

CTV has unleashed a powerful arsenal of interactive advertising techniques, including virtual product placement inserted into programming and altered in real time. CTV companies operate cutting-edge advertising technologies that gather, analyze, and then target consumers with ads, delivering them to households in the blink of an eye. These can be hyper targeted advertisements which are personalized for individual viewers.

The report profiles major players in the connected TV industry, along with the wide range of technologies they use to monitor and target viewers. Some household names you might be interested in include:

• Disney(+)
• Netflix
• Amazon
• Roku
• Vizio
• Comcast (NBCU)
• LG
• Samsung
• Google (YouTube)

“Many of these entities offer misleading and disingenuous ‘privacy policies’ and self-serving descriptions of their systems that fail to explain the complex processes they use to extract data from consumers, track viewing and other behaviors, and facilitate targeted marketing.”

Combine the data these companies are gathering about us with other information that data brokers possess, and you are way past anything we should find acceptable.

Experian offers “over 240 politically relevant audience” segments for sale, based on a detailed set of criteria, including “audience interactions, preferences, demographics, behaviors, location, income and more.”

The US market, which is one of only two that allow direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceutical products, is seeing marketers for pharmaceutical products that are heavily invested in connected TV advertising.

Industry research shows that families with young children tend to watch more streaming TV content. Children and teens play a powerful role in determining the viewing patterns of their families, serving as decision-makers when it comes to streaming content. Disney Advertising even calls the cohorts of children, teens and adults viewing its Disney+ and other content “Generation Stream.”

Report co-author Kathryn C. Montgomery, Ph.D. stated:

“Policy makers, scholars, and advocates need to pay close attention to the changes taking place in today’s 21st century television industry. In addition to calling for strong consumer and privacy safeguards, we should seize this opportunity to re-envision the power and potential of the television medium and to create a policy framework for connected TV that will enable it to do more than serve the needs of advertisers. Our future television system in the United States should support and sustain a healthy news and information sector, promote civic engagement, and enable a diversity of creative expression to flourish.”

Personal Data Remover

It may feel like keeping your sensitive data away from data brokers is a losing fight, but there are ways to stop those data brokers from collecting new information and, where possible, to have it deleted from their rosters. For people in the United States, Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover provides:   

• Immediate, deep scans across roughly 175 databases to find your personal data. 
• Personalized, in-depth reports on what data is being sold and who is selling it.  
• Automatic data removal requests for subscribers, which can save 300+ hours of manual work in wiping sensitive details off the internet, along with free DIY guides to tackle each site individually.  
• Recurring scans and data removal requests that will make it harder for invasive websites to rebuild their digital portraits of you.