When your TV is watching you
Let’s be honest here — most of us don’t read the privacy policies for smart televisions. While people understand that their televisions have microphones, cameras and tracking software, they don’t fully understand how much they’ve actually agreed to share with companies. So we asked legal experts who specialize in privacy — Christopher Dore of the Chicago-based law firm Edelson, Danielle Citron of the University of Maryland, William McGeveran of the University of Minnesota and Bradley Shear of Maryland-based Shear Law — to explain.
VOICE RECOGNITION DATA
Many televisions have voice recognition features that let you order your television around without having to fumble through menus or hit multiple buttons. For consumers, that could make your television easier to operate. Companies collect and keep vocal recordings to improve their own software, though they do their best to strip out personal information. The privacy trade- off here, legal experts say, is that there are always ways this information could be taken out of context, and that a snippet of your voice asking for a show could be used against you.
UNEXPECTED DATA COLLECTION
Sometimes these policies cover information you may not expect to see in a policy about your television, an indication of how many services are now tied to your tele- vision. For example, Samsung has a section about “Fitness data.” These services tend to be optional, so you only have to share that information if you want to — in Samsung’s case, the company also does a good job, the experts said, of explaining how the data will be applied.
VIEWING DATA
Companies collect viewing data — information about what you’re watching and when — to feed into their advertising systems. The idea is that you would see more relevant ads on your screen.
YOUR DATA COULD END UP WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT IT
We’ve already outlined how television makers share information with other companies, such as advertisers and technical partners. But our legal experts highlighted that data collected through your television can also show up in places that are com- pletely unexpected, because companies reserve a broad right to collect data to let you know about any “products and services.” That includes, for example, data brokers — firms that can gather information from several places to build a data profile of you and resell that information to other companies, including insurance companies or credit bureaus.
WHEN THE DATA IS OUT OF OUR HANDS
Also be aware that the company that makes your television isn’t the only one that could be collecting information about you. As with apps on a phone, the applications you put on your television entitle those app- makers to collect their own types of information, which they may need to show you recommendations, for example, or give you accurate directions to somewhere. But those actions aren’t covered by your television maker’s privacy policy — those are governed by the apps’ own policies.
WHAT THEY DON’T SAY
Our experts also said that what the companies don’t say is almost as important as what they do say. Shear cautioned, for example, that companies very rarely say how long they’ ll keep the collected data — so there’s no way of knowing if they’ll keep it for a month or for an eternity. On one hand, if you’re using the service that requires your personal information, it’s nice not to have to re-enter it. On the other, it does mean your data could stick around a long time.
OVERWHELMED?
If you’re not ready to dive into a full privacy policy, experts said, one good way to limit your data collection is to only turn on features that you’ ll really use. “Even if you’re not going to do work of hacking way through policy, it’s generally a good principle not to have features activated on services if you don’t use those features,” McGeveran said. “You can bet that you are reducing the overall amount of data collection by doing that.”