Yesterday we I look at a new hardware company called Telly that is giving away half a million of its new smart TVs for free. The problem is that the 55-inch smart TV is equipped with a second screen that sits below it and shows ads while you watch your favorite shows.
The trade-off for free TV is allowing this new company to collect vast amounts of data about you because the money the ads make covers the costs of the TV itself.
In accordance with its privacy policy, the startup collects data about what you watch, where you are, what you view, as well as what could be inferred about you from that information.
But notations left in its privacy policy that were published in error raise concerns about its data practices. As first pointed out journalist Shoshana Wodinsky:
We have glued under the part of Telly’s Privacy Policy verbatim, including typos, as published at the time, and have highlighted the questionable passage in bold to emphasize:
“As stated in the Terms of Use, we do not knowingly collect or solicit Personal Data about children under the age of 13; If you are a child under the age of 13, please do not attempt to register or use the Services or submit any Personal Data to us. Use of the Services may capture the physical presence of a child under the age of 13, but no Personal Data about the child is collected. If we learn that we have collected Personal Data from a child under the age of 13, we will delete that information as soon as possible. (I don’t know if this is accurate. Do we have to say we will delete the information or is there another way around this)? If you believe that a child under the age of 13 may have provided us with Personal Data, please contact us at…”
Shortly after contacting Telly for comment, the company removed the section of its privacy policy.
In an email, Telly’s chief strategy officer, Dallas Lawrence, said an earlier draft of the privacy policy was uploaded in error.
“The questions raised in the document between our developer team and our privacy legal counsel seem a bit out of context. The issue posed was a two-part technical question related to timing and whether or not it was possible for us to have this type of data,” Lawrence said. “It was unclear to the team how long we had to remove any data we might inadvertently capture about children under 13. The term ‘as quickly as possible’ that was included in the draft seemed vague and indeterminate and needed [sic] further clarification from a technical perspective.”
Lawrence said its developers did not believe it was possible to capture personal data from children under 13, adding that minors “cannot sign up” for Telly.
It is not the only red flag in politics itself. According to the policy, some of the data it collects is sensitive, such as precise geolocation. TV also collects names, email addresses, phone numbers, ages and dates of birth, ZIP codes, gender and ethnicity, and “sex life or sexual orientation.”
The startup says it also collects your “cultural or social identifiers,” like what sports team you’d like (“a Green Bay Packers fan”), what physical activities you enjoy (like “being a skateboarder”), but also things like if you are “an environmental activist,” says the policy.
While it may not be surprising that a free, ad-supported product would collect vast amounts of information about its users, there are dangers in collecting this data to begin with.
Ad networks collect lots of information from various sources (websites, phone apps, and ad-supported hardware) to create profiles about users that can be used for targeted advertising. The more ad networks collect, the more they can infer about you and the more they think they can accurately show you ads you’re likely to click and earn money.
Once the data is collected, the ad data is shared and sold by data brokers, who then sell it to other companies and businesses for anything. fraud prevention to enabling surveillance. Data brokers too sell ad data to law enforcement agencies, who can buy the data instead of obtaining a court order. The FTC recently charged data broker Kochava to sell geolocation data on “hundreds of millions” of mobile devices, which could be used to track the movements of people to sensitive locations, such as abortion clinics and places of worship.
Smart TVs are notorious data hogs. Years ago, Vizio televisions were caught spying on customer viewing habits and was then directed to offer customers a way to opt out of tracking. Other manufacturers of smart TVs are not much different: Samsung collects information about what users see on their smart TVsdata that was subsequently stolen in a data breach last year.
Especially with hardware, there is no such thing as free. If you don’t want your TV to tell the world what you’re watching and why, then Telly might not be for you.
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