Maybe it's best to stop streaming your cool personal porn on your smart tv:

"Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a
second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network
shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even video games
played on the TV."

https://www.wral.com/how-smart-tvs-in-millions-of-u-s-homes-track-more-than-what-s-on-tonight/17675939/

Business
How Smart TVs in Millions of U.S. Homes Track More Than What’s on Tonight

Posted 9:37 p.m. yesterday

By Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times

The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on
tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones. But people’s
data is also increasingly being vacuumed right out of their living rooms
via their televisions, sometimes without their knowledge.

In recent years, data companies have harnessed new technology to
immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs,
then using that information to send targeted advertisements to other
devices in their homes. Marketers, forever hungry to get their products in
front of the people most likely to buy them, have eagerly embraced such
practices. But the companies watching what people watch have also faced
scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates over how transparent they
are being with users.

Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to
make personalized show recommendations. The company said it collected
viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, and it has
raised $40 million in venture funding from investors including Time Warner
Cable, cable operator Liberty Global and billionaire Mark Cuban.

Samba TV has struck deals with roughly a dozen TV brands — including
Sony, Sharp, TCL and Philips — to place its software on certain sets.
When people set up their TVs, a screen urges them to enable a service
called Samba Interactive TV, saying it recommends shows and provides
special offers “by cleverly recognizing onscreen content.” But the
screen, which contains the enable button, does not detail how much
information Samba TV collects to make those recommendations.

Samba TV declined to provide recent statistics, but one of its executives
said at the end of 2016 that more than 90 percent of people opted in.

Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV
on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify
network shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even
video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the
ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or
liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched.

The big draw for advertisers — which have included Citi and JetBlue in
the past, and now Expedia — is that Samba TV can also identify other
devices in the home that share the TV’s internet connection.

Samba TV, which says it has adhered to privacy guidelines from the Federal
Trade Commission, does not directly sell its data. Instead, advertisers
can pay the company to direct ads to other gadgets in a home after their
TV commercials play, or one from a rival airs. Advertisers can also add to
their websites a tag from Samba TV that allows them to determine if people
visit after watching one of their commercials.

If it sounds a lot like the internet — a company with little name
recognition tracking your behavior, then slicing and dicing it to sell ads
— that is the point. But consumers do not typically expect the so-called
idiot box to be a savant.

“It’s still not intuitive that the box-maker or the software embedded
by the box-maker is going to be doing this,” said Justin Brookman,
director of consumer privacy and technology policy at the advocacy group
Consumers Union and a former policy director at the Federal Trade
Commission. “I’d like to see companies do a better job of making that
clear and explaining the value proposition to consumers.” About 45
percent of TV households in the United States had at least one smart TV at
the end of 2017, IHS Markit data showed. Samba TV, which is based in San
Francisco and has about 250 employees, competes against several companies,
including Inscape, the data arm of the consumer electronics maker Vizio,
and a startup called Alphonso.

It can be a cutthroat business. Samba has sued Alphonso for patent
infringement. Last year, Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle claims by the
Federal Trade Commission and the state of New Jersey that it was
collecting and selling viewing data from millions of smart TVs without the
knowledge or consent of set owners. In December, The New York Times
reported that Alphonso was using gaming apps to gain access to smartphone
microphones and listen for audio signals in TV ads and shows.

Samba TV’s language is clear, said Bill Daddi, a spokesman. “Each
version has clearly identified that we use technology to recognize
what’s onscreen, to create benefit for the consumer as well as Samba,
its partners and advertisers,” he added.

Still, David Kitchen, a software engineer in London, said he was startled
to learn how Samba TV worked after encountering its opt-in screen during a
software update on his Sony Bravia set.

The opt-in read: “Interact with your favorite shows. Get recommendations
based on the content you love. Connect your devices for exclusive content
and special offers. By cleverly recognizing onscreen content, Samba
Interactive TV lets you engage with your TV in a whole new way.”

The language prompted Kitchen to research Samba TV’s data collection and
raise concerns online about its practices.

Enabling the service meant that consumers agreed to Samba TV’s terms of
service and privacy policy, the opt-in screen said. But consumers could
not read those unless they went online or clicked through to another
screen on the TV. The privacy policy, which provided more details about
the information collected through the software, was more than 4,000 words,
and the terms exceeded 6,500 words. “The thing that really struck me was
this seems like quite an enormous ask for what seems like a silly, trivial
feature,” Kitchen said. “You appear to opt into a
discovery-recommendation service, but what you’re really opting into is
pervasive monitoring on your TV.”

Ashwin Navin, Samba TV’s chief executive, said that the company’s use
of data for advertising is made clear through the reference to “special
offers,” and that the opt-in language “is meant to be as simple as it
possibly can be.”

“It’s pretty upfront about the fact that this is what the software
does — it reads what’s on the screen to drive recommendations and
special offers,” Navin said. “We’ve taken an abundance of caution to
put consumers in control of the data and give them disclosure on what we
use the data for.”

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy,
said few people review the fine print in their zeal to set up new
televisions. He said the notice should also describe Samba TV’s
“device map,” which matches TV content to mobile gadgets, according to
a document on its website, and can help the company track users “in
their office, in line at the food truck and on the road as they travel.”

Brookman of the Consumers Union, who reviewed the opt-in screen, said the
trade-off was not clear for consumers. “Maybe the interactive features
are so fantastic that they don’t mind that the company’s logging all
the stuff that they’re watching, but I don’t think that’s evident
from this,” he said. Citi and JetBlue, which appear in some Samba TV
marketing materials, said they stopped working with the company in 2016
but not before publicly endorsing its effectiveness. JetBlue hailed in a
news release the increase in site visits driven by syncing its online ads
with TV ads, while Christine DiLandro, a marketing director at Citi,
joined Navin at an industry event at the end of 2015. In a video of the
event, DiLandro described the ability to target people with digital ads
after the company’s TV commercials aired as “a little magical.”

The New York Times is among the websites that allow advertisers to use
data from Samba to track if people who see their ads visit their websites,
but a Times spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, said that the company did that
“simply as a matter of convenience for our clients” and that it was
not an endorsement of Samba TV’s technology.

Companies like Samba TV are also a boon for television-makers, whose
profit margins from selling sets can be slim. Samba TV essentially pays
companies like Sony to include its software. Samba TV said “our business
model does subsidize a small piece of the television hardware,” though
it declined to provide further details.

Smart TV companies are not subject to the stricter rules and regulations
regarding viewing data that have traditionally applied to cable companies,
helping fuel “this rise of weird ways to figure out what someone’s
watching,” said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor of computer
science and public affairs at Princeton University and a former technology
adviser at the Federal Communications Commission.

The smart TV companies are overseen by the Federal Trade Commission, Mayer
said, meaning that “as long as you’re truthful to consumers, even if
you make it really hard to exercise choices or don’t offer choices at
all, you probably don’t have much of a legal issue.” Daddi said the
trade commission had held up Samba TV as “an exemplary model of data
privacy and opt-in policies,” pointing to its participation in a smart
TV workshop the agency held in late 2016.

A commission spokeswoman said that it invited a diverse array of panelists
to events and that “an invitation to participate in an FTC event does
not convey an endorsement of that company or organization.” She added
that the agency does not “endorse or bless companies’ practices.”

Daddi added: “We have millions of viewers who have explicitly opted into
our service and have continued to use it for years. So it is a fair
argument to make that far more consumers are satisfied with Samba than
surprised by it.”

Some worry, more broadly, about the TV industry’s increasing ability to
use and share information about what people are watching with the internet
ad ecosystem.

"I think people have rebelled to the online targeted ad experience,”
Brookman said, “and I think they wouldn’t necessarily expect that from
their TV.”

Posted on Rocksolid Light.