Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched. Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV declined to provide recent statistics, but one of its executives said at the end of 2016 that more than 90 percent of people opted in. The company said 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, the cable operator Liberty Global and the billionaire Mark Cuban. Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to make personalized show recommendations. But the companies watching what people watch have also faced scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates over how transparent they are being with users. Marketers, forever hungry to get their products in front of the people most likely to buy them, have eagerly embraced such practices. In recent years, data companies have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs, then using that information to send targeted advertisements to other devices in their homes.
But people’s data is also increasingly being vacuumed right out of their living rooms via their televisions, sometimes without their knowledge. The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones.
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