SAMBA INTERACTIVE TV SETUP SOFTWARE
SAMBA INTERACTIVE TV SETUP TV

Brookman of the Consumers Union, who reviewed the opt-in screen, said the trade-off was not clear for consumers.

SAMBA INTERACTIVE TV SETUP TV

He said the notice should also describe Samba TV’s “device map,” which matches TV content to mobile gadgets, according to a document on its website, and can help the company track users “in their office, in line at the food truck and on the road as they travel.” Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said few people review the fine print in their zeal to set up new televisions. “We’ve taken an abundance of caution to put consumers in control of the data and give them disclosure on what we use the data for.”

SAMBA INTERACTIVE TV SETUP SOFTWARE

“It’s pretty upfront about the fact that this is what the software does - it reads what’s on the screen to drive recommendations and special offers,” Mr. “You appear to opt into a discovery-recommendation service, but what you’re really opting into is pervasive monitoring on your TV.”Īshwin Navin, Samba TV’s chief executive, said that the company’s use of data for advertising is made clear through the reference to “special offers,” and that the opt-in language “is meant to be as simple as it possibly can be.” “The thing that really struck me was this seems like quite an enormous ask for what seems like a silly, trivial feature,” Mr. 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 behavior, then slicing and dicing it to sell ads - that’s 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. 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 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 percent of people opted in. 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 recognizing onscreen content.” But the screen, which contains the enable button, does not detail how much information Samba TV collects to make those recommendations.

Samba TV has struck deals with roughly a dozen TV brands - including Sony, Sharp, TCL and Philips - to place its software on certain sets. The company said it collected viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, and it has raised $40 million in venture funding from investors including Time Warner, the cable operator Liberty Global and the billionaire Mark Cuban. Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to make personalized 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 have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs, then using 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. The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones.

Samba interactive tv setup