How smart TVs in millions of U.S. homes track more than what's on tonight
How smart TVs in millions of U.S. homes track more than
what's on tonight
By Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times July 4, 2018
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.
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Smart TVs
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.
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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.”
Copyright 2018 New York Times News Service. All rights
reserved.
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