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"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. "What you are really opting into is pervasive monitoring on your TV," says David Kitchen, an engineer in London.
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But consumers do not typically expect the so-called idiot box to be a savant. If it sounds a lot like the internet – a company with little name recognition tracking your behaviour, then slicing and dicing it to sell ads – that is the point. 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. 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. Samba TV, which says it has adhered to privacy guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, does not directly sell its data. 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.
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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. 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 declined to provide recent statistics, but one of its executives said at the end of 2016 that more than 90 per cent of people opted in. But the screen, which contains the enable button, does not detail how much information Samba TV collects to make those recommendations. 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 recognising on-screen content". Samba TV has struck deals with roughly a dozen TV brands – including Sony, Sharp, TCL and Philips – to place its software on certain sets. There is a fear that TV software can help companies track users wherever they are. The company said it collected viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, and it has raised $US40 million ($54 million) in venture funding from investors including Time Warner Cable, cable operator Liberty Global and billionaire Mark Cuban. Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to make personalised show recommendations. But the companies watching what people watch have also faced scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates over how transparent they are being with users. Marketers, forever hungry to get their products in front of the people most likely to buy them, have eagerly embraced such practices. In recent years, data companies in the US have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs, then used that information to send targeted advertisements to other devices in their homes. But people's data is also increasingly being vacuumed right out of their living rooms via their televisions, sometimes without their knowledge.
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The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones.