Yes, your TV is spying on you—and harvesting your data, report finds

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Oct. 7, 2024 — America’s video streaming industry operates a massive data-driven surveillance apparatus that has transformed the television set into a sophisticated monitoring, tracking and targeting device, according to a new report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD).

Leading streaming video programming networks and “smart” TV manufacturers, allied with many of the country’s most powerful data brokers, are creating extensive digital dossiers on viewers based on a person’s identity information, viewing choices, purchasing patterns, and thousands of online and offline behaviors. Networks and streamers are able to combine that data with generative AI tools to deliver customized advertisements, including virtual product placements inserted into shows and delivered in real time.

How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era documents how internet-connected televisions (known as CTVs) capture and harvest information on individuals and families through a sophisticated and expansive commercial surveillance system, deliberately incorporating many of the data-gathering, monitoring, and targeting practices that have long undermined privacy and consumer protection online.

‘privacy nightmare’

The combination of smart TVs, streaming services, and data harvesting “has become a privacy nightmare for viewers,” explained report co-author Jeff Chester, who is the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race and political interests,” Chester noted.

“Regulation is urgently needed to protect the public from constantly expanding and unfair data collection and marketing practices,” he said, “as well as to ensure a competitive, diverse and equitable marketplace for programmers.”

disturbing trends

The report highlights a number of recent trends:

• So-called FAST channels (Free Advertiser-Supported TV)—such as Tubi, Pluto TV, and many others—are now ubiquitous, and a key part of the industry’s strategy to monetize viewer data and target them with sophisticated new forms of interactive marketing.

• Comcast/NBCU, Disney, Amazon, Roku, LG and other companies operate cutting-edge advertising technologies that gather, analyze and then target consumers with ads, delivering them to households in milliseconds. Streaming services and smart TVs have unleashed a powerful arsenal of interactive advertising techniques, including virtual product placement inserted into programming and altered in real time. Generative AI enables marketers to produce thousands of instantaneous “hypertargeted variations” personalized for individual viewers.

•  Surveillance has been built directly into television sets, with major manufacturers’ “smart TVs” deploying automatic content recognition (ACR) and other monitoring software to capture “an extensive, highly granular, and intimate amount of information that, when combined with contemporary identity technologies, enables tracking and ad targeting at the individual viewer level,” the report explains.

• Connected television is now integrated with online shopping services and offline retail outlets, creating a seamless commercial and entertainment culture through a number of techniques, including what the industry calls “shoppable ad formats” incorporated into programming and designed to prompt viewers to “purchase their favorite items without disrupting their viewing experience,” according to industry materials.

• Television manufacturer Samsung promises advertisers a wealth of data to reach their targets, deploying a variety of surveillance tools, including an ACR technology system that “identifies what viewers are watching on their TV on a regular basis,” and gathers data from a spectrum of channels, including “Linear TV, Linear Ads, Video Games, and Video on Demand.” It can also determine which viewers are watching television in English, Spanish, or other languages, and the specific kinds of devices that are connected to the set in each home.

self-regulation isn’t working

The industry’s self-regulatory regimes are highly inadequate, the report authors argue.

“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. Only those who can afford to pay are able to ‘opt out’ of seeing most of the ads—although much of their data will still be gathered.”

‘seize this opportunity’

“Policy makers, scholars, and advocates need to pay close attention to the changes taking place in today’s 21st century television industry,” argued report co-author Kathryn C. Montgomery, Ph.D. “In addition to calling for strong consumer and privacy safeguards,” she urged, “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.”

The Center for Digital Democracy is submitting letters today to the chairs of the FTC and FCC, as well as the California Attorney General and the California Privacy Protection Agency, calling on policymakers to address the report’s findings and implement effective regulations for the CTV industry.

A full copy of the report can be downloaded here.