Smart TVs and so-called “over the top” (OTT) platforms are the latest IoT devices found “spying” on users and leaking sensitive data to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Netflix, according to two separate studies conducted by university researchers as well as independent research done by a
Washington Post reporter.
Two reports–one by researchers from Northeastern University and Imperial College London and another by researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago–analyzed how smart TVs collect and then pass on information about users’ viewing habits and preferences to partner companies.
The former
report analyzed information exposure from 81 devices—including ones from Samsung, LG and Roku–located in labs in the United States and United Kingdom, finding that 72 of the devices sent data to a destination that was not the device manufacturer itself.
Companies most frequently contacted by the devices included Google, Akamai and Microsoft, mostly likely because they provide the cloud and networking services for smart-device operation, researchers said.
The Princeton
report discovered that information being sent from devices also originates with channels being viewed through the use of trackers, which are predominantly managed by Google and Facebook. Eighty-nine percent of Amazon Fire TV channels and 69 percent of Roku channels contained trackers collecting information about viewing habits and preferences, researchers found.
threatpost.com
