But when it comes to internet TV tracking, the public is still fairly unaware of the extent to which it’s happening, critics say. So yes, we’re all pretty accustomed to saying No when it comes to online tracking. And just last month, to loud applause, Apple introduced the ability to block this type of tracking in Safari. In February 2016, the French data protection agency CNIL gave Facebook three months to stop tracking non-users in France. In 2015, a Belgian court gave Facebook 48 hours to stop tracking non-users, which resulted in Belgians who didn’t have Facebook accounts being unable to view any Belgian Facebook pages, including public profiles. This tracking has, justifiably enough, met with forceful pushback. Well, yes, the company eventually admitted, coughing up the reasons why and pointing out that Facebook is far from the only online service to do so: Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google, and Amazon all offer services on other sites and apps, and following people around is part and parcel. Kathy Castor asked whether or not Facebook collects personal data on people who aren’t even Facebook users. Facebook, in fact, found itself in quite a bit of hot water over that one: CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat in Congress a few months ago, as Florida Rep. Sounds a lot like the internet at large, doesn’t it? Online services follow us around after we leave, taking note of where we go. And that, according to Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, helps the company to leap out of living rooms in order to track users “in their office, in line at the food truck and on the road as they travel.” With all those words, tucked into screens that Game of Thrones fans clearly aren’t clicking through to pore over, Samba gives itself the go-ahead to create a “device map” that matches TV content to devices sharing a network with a smart TV. That’s a lot of reading for somebody who just wants to find out if Jon Snow is going to accidentally sleep with his aunt. What the initial “enable” screen doesn’t include: a terms of service agreement that exceeds 6,500 words and a privacy policy that pushes past 4,000 words. The service promises to recommend shows and provide special offers “by cleverly recognizing onscreen content.” As of 2016, company executives said that more than 90% of people clicked the enable button.īut they were likely agreeing to give away far more data than they realized. It calls that software Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) and says that it delivers “essential TV insights.”Īs the Times reports, when a user gets one of these TVs out of the box, a screen urges them to enable a service called Samba Interactive TV. Samba has signed deals with about a dozen TV makers, including Sony, Sharp, Magnavox, Toshiba and Philips, to install its software on certain sets. The New York Times on Thursday published a report about Samba TV, which collects data on 13.5 million TV viewers in order to make its personalized show recommendations. Now, it turns out, one company that’s all about making personalized viewing recommendations is jumping beyond our living rooms in order to sniff out what’s happening on any device that’s on our networks, including our mobile devices, and that of course means following us around. Vacuuming our data straight out of our living rooms to see what we’re watching so they can target-market us is so last year. Last year, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) slapped TV maker Vizio with a $2.2m fine for watching us watch its TVs: the spy boxes were collecting data that included IP addresses and demographic information on 11 million users.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |