Streaming TV Industry Snooping on Viewers at Grand Scale: Report

The streaming television industry has been accused of operating a massive data-driven surveillance apparatus that is transforming TVs into sophisticated monitoring, tracking, and targeting devices.

In a 48-page report released Monday, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) outlined how the connected TV (CTV) industry captures and harvests 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.

“CTV has just replicated the commercial online surveillance ecosystem,” said CDD Executive Director Jeffrey Chester, who co-authored the report with Kathryn C. Montgomery.

“They’ve simply recast the original sins they’ve done repeatedly online,” he told TechNewsWorld. “They’re working with data brokers now. They’re working with adtech companies. They’re working with measurement companies. So there’s this multilayered, connected television surveillance system that no individual can really address.”

“It’s become a privacy nightmare because it’s happening throughout the television system, and regulators have really done nothing about it,” he added.

Creating Clandestine Digital Dossiers

According to the report, leading streaming video programming networks, CTV device companies, 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.

It also maintained that 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.

“People watch TV in the privacy of their own homes and have a reasonable expectation that no one is watching them watch,” said Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco.

“The trend of building surveillance into all new smart TVs is incredibly invasive and little understood,” he told TechNewsWorld. “When people buy a device, they expect that device to serve their needs, not the manufacturer’s desires. Nobody wants a snooping and snitching television, but lately, that’s all you can buy.”

Solution Looking for a Problem

Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore., pointed out that while the report highlights the potential for problems, it doesn’t provide any hard evidence of wrongdoing.

In addition, he continued, using the harvested information to create more effective ads or better programming, which has largely been accepted by users as a tradeoff for better programming and advertisements that speak to them.

“There isn’t much substance here, and the question must be asked of the user whether they are OK with this before acting with the assumption they aren’t,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Too often, we try to fix ‘problems’ that aren’t problems at all to the people affected by them, so care must be taken to assure the remedy addresses something people want fixed. Better programming and ads aren’t a problem to most users.”

The report also noted that CTV has 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, it added.

“A major pain point with ad-based streaming is when the ad repeats too many times or viewers seeing ads they don’t feel are relevant to them,” explained Sarah Lee, a research analyst with Parks Associates, a market research and consulting company specializing in consumer technology products, in Addison, Texas.

“Just 29% of ad-based streaming viewers feel the ads they see are for products and services that are relevant to them,” she told TechNewsWorld. “CTV players are working on features that will heavily use AI to align ads with household preferences and the content surrounding the ad so that viewers see more relevant ads.”

Incorporating interactive features, such as social media elements or direct shopping through ads, into streaming platforms is a concerning trend, noted Barry Lowenthal, president of Inuvo, an advertising solutions company headquartered in Little Rock, Ark.

“The convergence of streaming with e-commerce and social media ecosystems means that companies can now track an even broader range of online behaviors, combining this data with information from other platforms,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“Moreover, many of these devices operate in connected environments where data from smart TVs can be cross-referenced with data from other internet of things [IoT] devices in the home. This creates even more comprehensive profiles of users, often without their knowledge.”

Regulation Needed

In tandem with the report’s release, the CDD submitted letters 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 its report’s findings and implement effective regulations for the CTV industry.

“Policymakers, scholars, and advocates need to pay close attention to the changes taking place in today’s 21st-century television industry,” co-author Montgomery said in a statement.

“In addition to calling for strong consumer and privacy safeguards,” she continued, “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,” she added.

Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst at SmartTech Research in Las Vegas, noted that government regulation of the streaming industry may be necessary to protect consumer privacy and prevent data exploitation.

“Measures could include enforcing transparency in data collection practices, requiring clear and accessible privacy policies, and limiting the amount of personal information companies can harvest without explicit user consent,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Additionally, regulations could impose stronger security standards to safeguard user data and hold companies accountable for breaches or misuse of sensitive information.”

Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media, a website focusing on search, social media, and local digital commerce, added that non-consensual data harvesting has been and continues to be a problem across digital platforms.

“Virtually all the scenarios in the report involved opt-out provisions buried in terms and conditions or other difficult-to-find and utilize places,” he told TechNewsWorld. “The attitude of these companies is the more data, the better, and we’ll deal with the consequences if there are any.

“The government does need to get involved,” he continued, “and there needs to be comprehensive privacy regulation that requires all but the most basic data collection to be consent-based with serious penalties for violators.”