In July 2018, I wrote an article titled, “Big Business, Big Government, Big Money — Why You No Longer Have Any Privacy.” I spoke about how the industry of gathering information on you and your habits is big business. Well, it turns out the problem is worse than we thought. Believe it or not, you aren’t watching your television…your television is watching you.
Most of you probably don’t remember when “smart TVs” hit the market. They’re now pretty much the accepted norm—everyone has one. In fact, most of you would be hard-pressed to walk into any retail establishment and find a TV on the shelf that isn’t a smart TV…and that’s the point. Did you ever wonder why “they” want a smart TV in every home? Well, I am going to tell you why: It’s so they can spy on you.
Maybe smart TV is a really dumb idea. Let me explain.
Smart TVs made their debut on the retail market more than ten years ago. Yes, it’s been over a decade, if you can believe it. These smart TVs with built-in Ethernet ports and Wi-Fi support were developed by Hewlett-Packard and brought to the market around 2006 or 2007. When they first hit the market, everyone was amazed how the HP MediaSmart TV was capable of streaming movies from online content providers or, even better, was capable of linking to your home-based PC through the “Digital Living Network Alliance” (DLNA).
But here is what you probably don’t know.
The DLNA was founded way back in June 2003 by a conglomerate of commercial consumer electronic companies, with Sony leading the group. They dubbed their new sweeping technology innovation as “a new certification standard.” The purpose: to create and promote a set of interoperability guidelines in order to share digital media across multiple media devices. Sounds great in theory, but horrible in its applications.
Back in 2008, Samsung introduced one of the first “retail” smart TVs. It was revolutionary. Home users could hook up their PCs to their TV using a local area network (LAN) cable—they could watch the news, weather, stock prices, and just about any other form of content that you could load onto a USB flash drive.
Fast forward to the future. While you may not know it, our smartphones, computers, tablets, phablets, televisions, and just about any other multimedia device you can think of are all DLNA-certified devices. In fact, according to the latest numbers, over 200 companies are now part of the DLNA consortium of retail and consumer technology companies.
Now understand, there are Telecom service providers, cable providers, satellite network providers, ISPs, and more who all supposedly “protect” the digital rights management (DRM) for both the sender and the receiver. Allegedly, this is to protect all the information sharing that we do from piracy concerns or other data security breaches. But the question becomes: Who is watching the watchers?
Consider, in an effort to make using your smart TVs easier, they started putting in cameras to support a wide variety of apps…like Skype. The scary part? It is currently estimated that over 6 billion DLNA devices have been installed in homes across America. According to Nielsen Ratings, in the second-quarter of 2017 alone, over 69.5 million households used DLNA-connected TV devices. According to IHS market data, that is about half of all households in America.
That makes smart TVs the ultimate surveillance tool. And therein lies the danger.
Smart TVs are capable of monitoring and recording all user activity—they can send that data back to the manufacturer. In fact, if you take the time to read the fine print, you will see this warning on every single Samsung Smart TV: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”
Let me translate that: every word you say near your smart TV is being recorded and transmitted to a “third party.” Want to make a bet that one of those unidentified third parties is the National Security Agency?
You see, imbedded inside the software of your TV is a “smart” technology called Automated Content Recognition (ACR). This insidious software is capable of revealing all the data stored to any snooping “third-party”—who pays for the access—whenever your device connects to the Internet. Remember basic networking? Every single online domain that you visit is identified by a unique IP address. Through the use of ACR technology, you and your smart TV leave a trail of data that can show someone else everything you have been watching and when.
I wrote an article earlier this year about how Facebook was collecting data on you and then allowing third-party access to this data through an API for the right price. In short, they were illegally collecting everyone’s “meta-data” and then selling it without your knowledge or consent. Of course, everyone at Facebook, including Mark Zuckerberg, deny any knowledge. What makes you think it’s any different with your smart TV?
Consider, Samba TV created a specific data-tracking software that comes pre-installed on all smart TVs from multiple vendors, including Sony, Sharp, Philips and more. Now they hide this software in the set-up features and most people don’t even realize they are accepting the “opt-in” of this software use.
According to Samba themselves, “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 Cable, cable operator Liberty Global, and billionaire Mark Cuban.”
But it gets worse. Television maker Vizio just reached a record settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). They agreed, without admitting guilt, to pay a $2.2 million fine for transmitting consumer data back to their internal servers to sell it to advertisers. According to the settlement, Vizio was required to delete all the data collected by its devices up through March 1, 2016. There seems to be some doubt as to whether they actually did this…or if they made back-up files. Of course, Vizio now claims it has disabled their Internet application platform from all subsequent televisions.
That’s the problem. Most people never read the fine print, and for the next newest and greatest tech, we gladly sacrifice our privacy.
Thankfully, I am not the only one sounding the alarm. Many people are now becoming wise to what is going on and they are not happy about it. Many agree this is outright exploitation for nothing more than money and control. Case in point: shadow banning and the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. There are now a bunch of articles where you can find hints and tips for stopping your TV from spying on you. But about the only real way to do it is to turn it off and disconnect it from the Internet.
Folks, this should be terrifying to you. You are giving away your privacy for convenience. As NSA whistle-blower and political refugee Edward Snowden put it, abandoning any civil right for strictly personal reasons is folly: “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Or as Benjamin Franklin once said, “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
And this is where it all comes together. You see, online retailers and other advertisers buying and using your data doesn’t sound all that intrusive or harmful. But folks, that is just one side of the coin. Flip that coin over and you realize just how bad this is.
As reported by Electronic Frontier Foundation, there’s a new, proposed backdoor to our data, which would bypass our Fourth Amendment protections to communications privacy. It is built into a dangerous bill called the CLOUD Act which, if it passes, would allow police at home and abroad to seize cross-border data without following the privacy rules where the data is stored.
This new backdoor for cross-border data mirrors another backdoor under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, an invasive NSA surveillance authority for foreign intelligence gathering. That law, recently reauthorized and expanded by Congress for another six years, gives U.S. intelligence agencies, including the NSA, FBI, and CIA, the ability to search, read, and share our private electronic messages without first obtaining a warrant.
The new backdoor in the CLOUD Act operates much in the same way. U.S. police could obtain Americans’ data, and use it against them, without complying with the Fourth Amendment.
The CLOUD Act (S. 2383 and H.R. 4943) has two major components. First, it empowers U.S. law enforcement to grab data stored anywhere in the world, without following foreign data privacy rules. Second, it empowers the President to unilaterally enter executive agreements with any nation on earth, even known human rights abusers. Under such executive agreements, foreign law enforcement officials could grab data stored in the United States, directly from U.S. companies, without following U.S. privacy rules like the Fourth Amendment—as long as the foreign police are not targeting a U.S. person or a person in the United States.
So, the question to you is this: Are you worried? Because you should be. Reach out to your representatives and make sure they vote nay on the CLOUD Act.
