TV is watching you – Companies inventing new ways to make money off your data

is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He’s spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. Roku City, the oddly alluring cityscape screen saver, scrolls across millions of idle TVs every day. Recently, an island paradise appeared in the picture. In the foreground, a floating billboard invited me to subscribe to Disney+ and watch Moana 2 at the press of a button on my remote. The convenience, I don’t mind about the new era of ad-supported everything. The wiretapping, I do. Ads are obviously not new on TV. As long as we’ve been watching shows on glowing boxes, we’ve been watching commercials that provide the economic engine for the entire entertainment factory to operate. While streaming platforms offered a reprieve for a few years by charging monthly fees for commercial-free content, it’s now practically impossible to watch TV without seeing some sort of mark ... Read full article.