Companies Are Keeping Track of What Viewers Binged On Last Night

If you're watching, so are they. JL

Tiffany Hsu reports in The New York Times:

Many streaming customers are unaware that the sitcom titles they prefer, the ads they do not skip, their email addresses and the serial numbers identifying the devices they use are being distributed. Roku and Amazon Fire TV, along with smart TVs from manufacturers like LG and Samsung, were sharing viewer data with Netflix and other advertisers, even when the devices were not configured with Netflix accounts. Roku’s “limit ad tracking” function sent information to more trackers than when the function was turned off. Clicking to 'disable interest ads' on the Amazon Fire TV Stick made little difference.

A spate of streaming services are on their way from major tech and entertainment companies, promising viewers a trove of binge-worthy new shows and movies.

There’s something for advertisers, too: your personal data.

Recent deals involving the media conglomerate AT&T, the streaming device seller Roku, the advertising giant Publicis and other companies have expanded the surveillance infrastructure that operates in the background of streaming services. While viewers focus on the action onscreen, tracking technology quietly sops up information about their habits and uses it to target them with more relevant, traceable ads.

It is a “digital daisy chain of data-gathering on viewers,” according to Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. Many streaming customers are unaware that the sitcom titles they prefer, the ads they do not skip, their email addresses and the serial numbers identifying the devices they use are being harvested and distributed. Others willingly opt in to, say, have a record of their recent cooking show binge, watched through Amazon Fire TV, transmitted to an advertiser that can then deliver a recipe book ad to their laptop or tablet.

But recent research suggests that even when viewers try to shield their information, it is sometimes tracked without their permission and shared with corporate giants like Facebook, Google and Netflix.

“It’s much harder now to grab people’s attention,” said Ross Benes, an analyst with eMarketer. “To reach through the clutter, you need a lot of data. But finding the balance is the trick — you shouldn’t have to read through 80,000 words of legalese when you sign up for a streaming service.”

In the coming months, new services from Apple, NBCUniversal, the Walt Disney Company and AT&T’s WarnerMedia will start streaming content on connected televisions and devices from Amazon, Google, Roku and more. On Tuesday, Verizon said it would offer a free year of Disney Plus to many of its wireless customers when the streaming service debuts on Nov. 12.

Streaming technology is a tantalizing opportunity for advertisers, giving them more specific knowledge of just who is watching — a change from what they knew about the audiences for traditional TV. And for the television networks venturing into streaming, the format is a draw to advertisers that have increasingly turned to Facebook and Google.

Hulu, a streaming service controlled by Disney, tells advertisers like Kroger and Lexus that it can help them target consumers based on age, sex, location, and “interests and real world actions — both on and off Hulu.” The service also says it can measure how an ad performed through partnerships with third-party companies to “count every viewer watching ads.”

Advertisers are expected this year to continue shifting more of their budgets away from network television, where ratings are down and ad prices are rising, to streaming platforms, bolstering their spending by 39 percent, to $3.8 billion, according to the ad-buying and media intelligence firm Magna. The Trade Desk, a platform for advertising buyers, said in August that spending on connected television advertising went up more than 250 percent from a year earlier.

On Roku, more than 3,200 channels — some focused on webcam footage, others dedicated to cat videos — support advertising, nearly a thousand more than were available a year earlier, according to data from Pixalate, an advertising fraud intelligence firm.

The data generated by such channels about the programming and ads that customers like to watch is funneled to advertisers by a growing ecosystem of data brokers and other middlemen. They talk up their ability to reach audiences “whenever and wherever they happen to be watching” and proclaim that “the days of blindly serving an unknown number of ads to the same audience are over.”

Roku, which draws more revenue from advertising and related business than from sales of its streaming players, said on Tuesday that it had spent $150 million to acquire Dataxu, a company that helps advertisers automate campaign placement online. Last week, AT&T’s advertising and analytics unit, Xandr, said it had bought Clypd, a platform that can send targeted ads to multiple devices in a single household. Publicis’ ability to collect consumer data helped it win a coveted contract this month to help Disney Plus with its marketing strategy.

Many streaming channels, including those marketed to children, do not clearly disclose that viewer patterns are being tracked and shared, privacy experts said. Connected television companies and tracking software developers such as Vizio and SambaTV have been accused in recent years of selling data from TV sets without the owners’ knowledge or consent; lawmakers have called for investigations of the practice.

Last month, a study from Princeton University and the University of Chicago found examples of some streaming channels on Roku and Amazon Fire TV contacting more than 60 separate trackers, including some owned by Google and Facebook.

When researchers turned on Roku’s “limit ad tracking” function — which is meant to keep more personal data out of the hands of advertisers — they found that Roku sent information to more trackers than when the function was turned off.

Similarly, clicking on the option to “disable interest ads” on the Amazon Fire TV Stick made little difference in the number of device serial numbers and other identifiers that were sent to trackers.

A separate study from Northeastern University and Imperial College London last month reached a similar conclusion: Roku and Amazon Fire TV, along with smart TVs from manufacturers like LG and Samsung, were sharing viewer data with Netflix and other advertisers, even when the devices were not configured with Netflix accounts.

The streaming universe is turning into “a breeding ground for fraudsters and others who might abuse the system,” said Jalal Nasir, the chief executive of Pixalate.

Data on viewers who stream shows changes hands often and is not stored or authenticated in a consistent way, he said. Advertisers, hoping for a more comprehensive picture of viewers, while not fully trusting the snapshots provided, are asking for even more data from streaming companies, he said.

“There’s a huge, huge disconnect, because the data collection standards are very loosey-goosey,” Mr. Nasir said. “There’s so much money involved, so many players in the industry, but also a lack of standardization and education for regulators, consumers and advertisers.”