The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), an American non-profit organization, has published a report in which it examines how connected television and Smart TV technologies are incorporating tools that serve to extract user data, with the aim of directing personalized ads.
A few weeks ago we already commented that LG was beginning to introduce advertisements in the form of screensavers on its smart televisions. The audiovisual industry (Netflix or Disney+) and technology manufacturers (Samsung, LG, Google, Amazon or Vizio), as a whole, are looking for an income generation model based on segmented advertising, and the new capabilities of Smart TVs to record Our consumption habits, in a similar way to what happens on the Internet with advertising cookies, worries organizations in defense of users such as the CDD.
The report, titled “How Television is Watching Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Age of Streaming,” focuses on what is happening in the United States, but its findings and warnings also serve as a warning to citizens of the European Union, even if we are somewhat more protected thanks to community privacy laws.
Its authors note: ‘The US cable TV streaming business has deliberately incorporated many of the data surveillance marketing practices that have long undermined privacy and consumer protection in the online world’ oldest’ of social networks, search engines, mobile phones and video services like YouTube.
Technology at the service of marketing
In this way, they regret that the same techniques with which data is extracted and analyzes behavior on social networks and the Internet are also reaching smart televisions.
Some of these tools are:
- Identifications without cookies.
- Identity graphs that combine multiple IDs to link activity across devices and locations.
- Automatic content recognition (ACR) software that analyzes what’s on the screen.
- AI-powered ad targeting that “analyzes the text, images, and sentiment of a scene, determines an emotional score, and then places ads with a similar emotional score.”
The report also criticizes these practices by FAST channel providers, such as Tubi or Amazon Freevie in the US or Pluto TV in Spain. The authors warn that the proliferation of FAST channels, that is, those that provide content for free in exchange for advertising breaks like traditional TV, “allows sellers to engage in better product placement by incorporating their brands directly into the programming content to target individual viewers.
Back in 2017, the American Smart TV manufacturer Vizio had to pay a fine of more than two million dollars for collecting the viewing histories of 11 million of its Smart TVs without the users’ consent, matching this information with demographic information specific to the viewing data, such as gender, age, income, marital status, educational level and home ownership, size and value.
CDD has sent this report to several oversight agencies: the US Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and California privacy regulators. In the references section, they indicate: “It is important to highlight that in the European Union privacy is considered a fundamental human right.”
Integrated into the TV software
One of the “key” surveillance tools is the ACR, in which LG (with its LG Ad Solutions division) or Samsung, for example, work in one way or another.
This technology is capable of tracking and analyzing the content and advertising that appears on the TV screen. As described by a sector publication, the ACR “is integrated into the operating system of a television, where it captures frame-by-frame screenshots of the content. “ACR ingests pixels on the screen to assign a value to each frame, which is considered an ‘unknown fingerprint’ at this stage,” they explain.
“The software then sends these ‘fingerprints’ to a database that records the content available on the TV to find a known match and identify the content. Once ACR identifies the program, it can link that viewing data to a specific household,” details AdExchanger magazine.
As we see, the era of streaming has not put an end to advertising on television, far from it. On the contrary, the emergence of technology in the audiovisual sector is enhancing the possibilities of marketing. It is possible that, not long from now, we will see something similar to the return of dumb phones in the smartphone sector happening in the television sector; a preference for devices with lower capabilities.
