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The evaluation of image content to personalize advertising content is deeply rooted in modern television. It’s not just app developers that incorporate tracking into their offerings – smart TV makers also extensively measure usage behavior.
Ad tracking is a thing of the past on smart TVs. One New research from British, Spanish and Californian universities However, this is related to limits at the operating system level and differences between different usage scenarios, such as running a streaming app or having a game console connected. One device each from Samsung and LG serves as an example – however, other manufacturers also collect data and are likely to follow suit.
First the good news: All analysis traffic can be prevented via the data protection and privacy settings in the TV menu, although you usually have to do this manually (opt-out). Investigation confirms that television no longer calls home. Where these options are hidden varies by manufacturer and sometimes model. If in doubt, the operating instructions will help.
automatic content recognition
The basic technology is called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR): Smart TVs routinely create hashes from visible and partially audible content, known as fingerprints. These hashes are loaded encrypted into the creator cloud and compared with a database of mainly movies, series and games on the server side. During a match, the creator knows what the user is currently watching or playing. On the one hand, the manufacturer can display appropriate advertisements in the interface, and on the other hand, the findings are also useful for advertising agreements.
Researchers believe that users can be identified through consumption habits, even if the fingerprints contain no personal identifiers.
Multiple screenshots per second
SAMSUNG Samsung openly advertises data collection under advertising bannerSamsung writes that smart TVs take screenshots every 500 milliseconds. The LG is even more collectible with screenshots every 10 milliseconds. Both manufacturers send fingerprints in batches: LG every 15 seconds, Samsung every minute. In terms of volume, uploads are manageable at two to six kilobytes per interval. The primary problem is the comparison of personalized advertising.
Samsung and LG primarily collect data in two scenarios: when the linear television is playing via the integrated TV tuner or when you connect a player via HDMI, provided the television is still connected to the Internet. This could be a game console like the Playstation 5 or Xbox Series
Treacherous: This is how creators take away the right to create fingerprints from private images. This is especially unpleasant if artificial intelligence (AI) is used to analyze image content.
Smart TVs collect data for advertising purposes, especially with linear television and HDMI playback. It’s hardly relevant whether you’re logged into the smart TV or not. “Lin-in” means “log-in, opt-in” (ie data protection settings are off), “Lout-in” means “log-out, opt-in”.
(Image: Gianluca Anselmi and Yash Vekaria, et al.)
Netflix and Co. love to analyze themselves
Home screens drive 12x less ACR traffic when screencasting from a smartphone or when a streaming app like Netflix is open directly on the TV. This is due to the regulations of the major streaming providers, who prevent automatic content identification and prefer to do their own analysis.
When tested in the UK, all LG ACR domains will be resolved in Amsterdam. This advertising partner is eu-acrX.alphonso.tv from Alphonso, where “X” stands for any number. Samsung uses four domains: acr-eu-prd.samsungcloud.tv, acr0.samsungcloudsolution.com, log-config.samsungacr.com and log-ingestion-eu.samsungacr.com. One commits to the United States, which is permitted within the EU-US data privacy framework.
(mma)
