The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) has released a new report that concludes today’s Smart TVs and streaming devices are part of a “massive data-driven surveillance apparatus” designed to serve advertisers over consumers. The CDD says its mission is to “ensure that digital technologies serve and strengthen democratic values, institutions and processes,” while striving “to safeguard privacy and civil and human rights, as well as to advance equity, fairness, and community.”
Full-screen screensaver ads now appearing on all LG Smart TVs
As a result of its report, ‘How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era,’ the CDD has petitioned the FTC, FCC and California regulators to investigate connected TV practices in hopes for stricter regulations.
“CTV (connected TV) has become a privacy nightmare for viewers,” says report co-author and Executive Director of CDD, Jeff Chester. “It is now a core asset for the vast system of digital surveillance that shapes most of our online experiences. 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 notes. “Regulation is urgently needed to protect the public from constantly expanding and unfair data collection and marketing practices,” he adds, “as well as to ensure a competitive, diverse and equitable marketplace for programmers.”
Here are some of the key findings of the report, directly from the CDD:
- 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.
- So-called FAST channels (Free Advertiser-Supported TV)—such as Tubi, Pluto TV, and many others—are now ubiquitous on CTV, 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 CTV companies operate cutting-edge advertising technologies that gather, analyze and then target consumers with ads, delivering them to households in milliseconds. 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.
- 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.
