What you watch is no longer private, and the price of admission is your personal data
I don’t use wifi with my TV, streaming is via laptop connected to the TV. If nothing else I know where the camera is on the laptop and know where to put the tape.
Loss of control is the canary in the coal mine of ownership. At the end of March, that canary’s song wavered as Walmart announced its new Vizio televisions will require customers to sign in to Walmart accounts to access smart TV features.
ACR allows TV makers and other surveillance businesses to more accurately track watching habits at a far greater scale. Instead of making assessments based on the channel to which an owner’s set is tuned, ACR takes snapshots of audio or video as often as every 10 milliseconds from any media source connected to your TV, and compares them against a broader video database. Because the technology is built into devices and ‘consent’ to be tracked is often buried in the terms of service required to use smart features, manufacturers and their ACR partners are able to track what nearly every smart TV viewer is watching.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/198308331
Guest post by Grace Hermann, FULU.org
With the rise of streaming, it’s obvious you don’t own the shows you watch on Netflix or Hulu. You lose access to content the minute your bill is overdue. Which makes sense.
When it comes to the TV on which you watch that show, however, it sure feels like you own it. After all, you bought the device and installed it in your living room or bedroom. No one tells you which streaming service to use or which Blu-ray player to hook up. You own it, so you control how it is used.
Loss of control is the canary in the coal mine of ownership. At the end of March, that canary’s song wavered as Walmart announced its new Vizio televisions will require customers to sign in to Walmart accounts to access smart TV features.
This move, one of the most aggressive in undermining owners’ control of their televisions to date, is the latest in an industry with a long history of surveillance.
The history of watching us watch TV
Since the invention of the television, companies have wanted to know what Americans were watching. The A.C. Nielsen Company, now known as Nielsen IQ, first created television ratings in 1950. In exchange for allowing the company to install meters that monitored when a TV was in use and to which channel it was tuned, Nielsen would pay a group of demographically representative families to track what they watched. Monitoring viewing habits paid off as the resulting data served a wealthy market: the advertising industry.
As technology has progressed, so have the ways that Nielsen and others track what people watch. The development of automatic content recognition (ACR)—which companies now owned by Roku, Vizio, and Nielsen began to patent as early as 2008—added TV manufacturers to the mix.
ACR allows TV makers and other surveillance businesses to more accurately track watching habits at a far greater scale. Instead of making assessments based on the channel to which an owner’s set is tuned, ACR takes snapshots of audio or video as often as every 10 milliseconds from any media source connected to your TV, and compares them against a broader video database. Because the technology is built into devices and ‘consent’ to be tracked is often buried in the terms of service required to use smart features, manufacturers and their ACR partners are able to track what nearly every smart TV viewer is watching.
After a 2017 Federal Trade Commission complaint against Vizio for collecting data without consent, more TV makers have moved to allow consumers to opt out of ACR tracking. But many don’t make it easy. Manufacturers often obscure the software’s invasive nature by naming ACR technology to imply improved user experiences and hiding the opt-out option 4-10 clicks into the settings menu.
Even if a user has previously opted out, data-sharing permissions are also often re-enabled during software updates. Those wishing to take more complete measures, such as permanently deleting ACR software, risk bricking their device.
As a result, companies gather up to 100 billion data points each day, which they use to build advertising profiles about individual viewers that can include information such as suspected race, political leanings, religious beliefs, age, and geographic location.
TV makers are in the surveillance business, and business is a-booming
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 