In an article of Financial Times, it became apparent that smart TV’s are leaking user data to tech-giants, like Google, Netflix and Facebook. Even when your device is switched-off, it can still send data to third-party advertisers. Third parties involved include, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify and Microsoft.
According to researchers from Northeastern University and Imperial College London, smart TV’s from Samsung and LG are sending sensitive user data, like location and IP addresses to Netflix and other companies. Other devices, for example streaming dongles Roku and FireTV by Amazon, speakers and cameras are sending information about what consumers are watching. Content recognition technology is used to track everything you are watching to target you better with advertisements.
This research puts light on the already available concerns about privacy of user data on the web. Smart devices can send out information, even when the consumer is not signed in into any of the platforms, like Netflix.
The study was conducted on 81 different devices in the US and the UK. One of the most frequently contacted companies was Amazon, followed by Google, Akamai and Microsoft. Some of these companies provide cloud services to the smart device to be able to operate it and that is the reason they are so frequently contacted in the experiment.
One of the major findings is that Amazon is contacted by almost half the devices in the test. This is not that surprising since they do know a lot about their customers. However, by gaining this information they can get more knowledge about what you are doing with different devices in our home, even information about devices Amazon does not manufacture. This way, they have a lot of visibility into what their competitors are doing.
Netflix, Facebook and Google gave information about what exactly they receive from smart devices, like smart TV’s. According to Netflix, they receive information about how Netflix performs and appears on screen. Facebook mentioned that it is common for devices and apps to send data to third-party services that are integrated into them. Google stated that smart TV app developers can use Google’s ad services to show ads or measure the performance of ads. The publisher may share data with Google but it is depended on the device manufacturer or the app owner. Data includes user, location, device type and what the user is watching so that they can be targeted with personalized advertising.
In my opinion, it is becoming more and more clear how much information smart devices can gather about us just by owning a device. I believe, we need to be more careful what to bring into our homes when clearly the manufacturers and developers do not seem to care about what is ethical and okay to do. I think this is an urgent point for debate, because it will might lose control over our privacy.
Ren, J., Mandalari, A., Dubois, D., Kolcun, R., Choffnes, D., Haddadi, H. 2019. Information exposure from consumer IoT devices: a multidimensional, network-informed measurement approach. Association for Computing Machinery.
Financial Times. 2019. Smart TV’s sending sensitive user data to Netflix and Facebook.
https://www.ft.com/content/23ab2f68-d957-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17
Telegraaf. 2019. Smart tv? Netflix kijkt met je mee. https://www.telegraaf.nl/financieel/1660391304/smart-tv-netflix-kijkt-met-je-mee?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic
