alt Hacker News> WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?
At least a decade ago! The first TVs with Automatic Content Recognition shipped in 2013[0]. There was also a brief panic in 2024 about air fryers spying on people[1].
And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer...
Replies
I’ll keep repeating this but I used to be a technical project manager for “advance analytics” for a major media agency and we used this data in our reporting for ad reach effectiveness.
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes. Basically any internet connected device you get is probably doing whatever it can to sniff mac addresses of your network at the least.
From a previous comment of mine:
> … my Insignia TV (best buy store brand) with fire tv built in is basically unusable. Echoing a previous comment I made too, about “smart tvs” and the “streaming sticks”: Hey, have you ever thought of why even the $149 Black Friday loss-leader no-name-brand TVs all have Amazon Fire, Roku, or are now "Smart" in some way? Certainly isn't because they need to incentivise you to connect it to the internet so it acts as a Nielsen-esq measurement device of all media you view on the screen via digital fingerprints that exist in all commercial media and advertisements. [1][2]
Ah the good old days when "we kill people based on metadata"[0] was the conversation and we thought it wouldn't get more invasive. Now we just straight up extract data
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tL8_caB35Pg