#GOOGLE TV BROWSER HACK TV#
It’s pretty creepy stuff – ACR works on anything played on the TV including DVDs and Blu-rays, CDs and games.
Often turned on by default, this uses analytical techniques to identify video and audio running on the TV, matching it against a big database to identify what’s being played. One scary feature to look out for is automated content recognition (ACR). What is automatic content recognition or ACR?īack to the smart TV itself. Yet most of the data Netflix gathers, such as the shows you watched and when, is so core to its service that you can’t opt out of it. If you log on to Netflix via your browser, you can tweak the privacy settings to limit the data that’s collected and shared. Netflix’s powerful recommendations algorithm fuels the quality of its service by helping you choose which shows to watch. But this can include data such as device identifiers, geo-location, browser type, email address and payment information. Apps such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Now TV tend to claim they only use data for necessary services such as recommendations or credit checks. Using streaming services on a smart TV is another surefire way to hand over lots of your personal data. “It is often unclear what data exactly is being sent back, depending on the T&Cs and privacy settings, and it can be very difficult to change default settings once you have agreed to them.” How streaming services are also gathering data “After the data has been sold, it is out of the manufacturer’s control,” Lewis says. Manufacturers claim to use your information for “personalisation” and quality of content, but it is common to sell this type of data, anonymised or semi-anonymised, to third parties, advertising companies or streaming services. There is not much difference between TV brands. “When looking at what a smart TV does on the network, it is often unclear why certain data is being harvested and where it is being sent.” What exactly is done with the data is complex and “highly opaque”, says Lewis. “Most apps installed on your smart TV will be snitching to a large network of advertisers and data brokers,” Fielding warns. Apps and browsers on smart TVs use cookie- and pixel-tracking technologies just like websites do to track, recognise and identify devices for user-profiling. “This allows individuals to be profiled in detail: geo-location history, web browsing activity and social media information can be added to TV data.”
Data collected via your smart TV is more valuable when combined with information from other smart devices such as mobile phones, laptops and home automation gear, according to Fielding.
These recordings might be sent to third parties to be analysed.Ĭross-device tracking is another issue to consider.
#GOOGLE TV BROWSER HACK SOFTWARE#
Microphones and software are listening for instructions and they can capture conversations and other sounds within range. Voice activation is one feature with the potential to gather large amounts of data. In theory, most smart TVs are capable of collecting audio, video and TV usage data, says Toby Lewis, global head of threat analysis at cybersecurity company Darktrace. The data collected by your smart TV depends on its manufacturer, brand and version. A study by researchers at Northeastern University and Imperial College London found data from TVs and smart devices was sent to Google’s ad business and to Netflix, even if people didn’t have Netflix.
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