by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(Children’s Health defense) The streaming television industry has morphed into a vast data-driven viewer surveillance apparatus, transforming people’s TVs into tools for monitoring, tracking and targeting, according to a new report from the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy.
The 48-page report, “How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era,” charts the evolution from broadcast, cable and satellite television to connected TV (CTV), a term that encompasses the wide range of content delivered through the internet to smart TVs.
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CTV includes popular apps like YouTube TV, Free Advertiser-Supported TV (FAST) channels, and streaming services like Disney +, Netflix and Amazon Prime. It also includes Roku, smart TVs and smart TV devices themselves.
The report documents how CTV, whose surge in viewership is largely driven by young audiences, harvests user data through a “sophisticated and expansive commercial surveillance system” that privacy advocates argue undermines existing consumer protections.
“CTV has become a privacy nightmare for viewers,” said Jeff Chester, report co-author and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, in a press release. “It is now a core asset for the vast system of digital surveillance that shapes most of our online experiences … as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race and political interests.”
Over the past five years, CTV corporations have teamed up with data brokers like Experian and TransUnion to create new data-mining tools that capture and aggregate everything an individual user does on their smart TV. This information can be integrated with data captured from other devices and real-world activities.
Existing privacy policies don’t explain or protect people from these new forms of data capture, the Center for Digital Democracy said — so viewers should disregard any promises companies make about not collecting or sharing user information.
These new data-capture practices form the foundation for a system with “unprecedented capabilities for surveillance and manipulation,” the report warns. “As a consequence, buying a smart TV set in today’s connected television marketplace is akin to bringing a digital Trojan Horse into one’s home.”
The Center for Digital Democracy submitted the report, along with letters to the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the California attorney general and the California Privacy Protection Agency, calling for an investigation into the industry.
How does CTV capture data?
According to the report, CTV saw a dramatic rise in viewership during the COVID-19 lockdowns “when hundreds of millions of Americans who were forced to stay in their homes found comfort and diversion in the vast number of channels offering a steady supply of movies, television series, sports, and other programming.”
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