48-page report urges FTC, FCC to investigate connected TV industry data harvesting.
The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a “surveillance system” that has “long undermined privacy and consumer protection,” according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a “privacy nightmare,” according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation.
Not enough people are talking about the SFC v. Visio case currently being heard in California. Depending on the outcome of the case (and it’s looking fairly good for the Software Freedom Conservancy, not to get anyone’s hopes up), we might have fully-FOSS distros for existing consumer smart TVs sometime in the somewhat-not-too-distant future. Like we have OpenWRT and dd-wrt for routers and Graphine and LineageOS for smartphones. And there are potential implications for other types of consumer hardware devices.
That’s a good thing, but Smart TVs should only be a limited option in the first place. Most people do not need them or like them.
I shouldn’t have to understand how to install a different OS on a TV in order to take the useless “smart” features away.