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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://tv-watches-you.princeton.edu/tv-tracking-acm-ccs19.pdf [princeton.edu]

The number of Internet-connected TV devices has grown signifi-
cantly in recent years, especially Over-the-Top (“OTT”) streaming
devices, such as Roku TV and Amazon Fire TV. OTT devices offer
an alternative to multi-channel television subscription services,
and are often monetized through behavioral advertising. To shed
light on the privacy practices of such platforms, we developed a
system that can automatically download OTT apps (also known as
channels), and interact with them while intercepting the network
traffic and performing best-effort TLS interception. We used this
smart crawler to visit more than 2,000 channels on two popular
OTT platforms, namely Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Our results
show that tracking is pervasive on both OTT platforms, with traffic
to known trackers present on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of
Amazon Fire TV channels. We also discover widespread practice of
collecting and transmitting unique identifiers, such as device IDs,
serial numbers, WiFi MAC addresses and SSIDs, at times over un-
encrypted connections. Finally, we show that the countermeasures
available on these devices, such as limiting ad tracking options and
adblocking, are practically ineffective. Based on our findings, we
make recommendations for researchers, regulators, policy makers,
and platform/app developers.

Original Submission