“There are things known and there are things unknown and in between are the doors of perception.” — Aldous Huxley

I’m Junior Huxley Westemeier, and welcome to The Sift, a weekly The Rubicon opinions column focused on the impacts and implications of new technologies.

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Algorithms are always watching. That’s not some hypothetical plot of a modern Orwellian thriller- it’s reality. YouTube tracks how long you spend on each video to recommend better content. Websites such as news organizations and retail stores note what you click on and record your interests over time. Colleges send emails with links that sometimes track ‘demonstrated interest’ by calculating how much you interact with a particular school’s website and emails. All of this is done in the name of helpfulness- after all, knowing what you are shopping for does make an online experience (for example, Amazon Prime’s search tools) personal and more efficient.

However, multiple apps have recently come into question regarding the sheer amount of data they’re collecting about their users. TikTok is the largest (and most publicly recognized) culprit. The Wall Street Journal did an analysis in 2021 where they created fake accounts with various interests- and the algorithm was able to match and show content related to those interests within two hours on the app. A new scientific study published on Sept. 10 did a deep dive into a similar type of tracking that few people are aware of: their televisions.

The paper examines Automatic Content Recognition and its uses in Smart TVs. ACR is basically Shazam for screenshots. If you’re watching Bad Sisters on Apple TV+, for example, your TV feeds a screenshot to an ACR algorithm that can figure out exactly what show you’re watching and the timestamp.

This appears innocent until the research study determined that LG TVs are taking screenshots of your display every 10ms (or 100 frames every second). Your TV isn’t just using this data- it’s being transferred over the WIFI connection after 15 seconds to an LG server. Similar behavior was also observed for Samsung televisions. While there’s no indication as to what those servers are doing with the data, it’s still terrifying that your screen’s content is constantly being reported to a mysterious computer somewhere in the world. It’s likely that the data is being sold to streaming services to help them further build a profile just for you. If you’re known to watch Stranger Things on Netflix, you might respond to advertisements for The Last Of Us on HBO Max.

As comforting as it might be to assume that our information is safe and secure, never leaving our devices- that’s sadly not true. Data about us- from our scroll speed, our cursor locations, the amount of time we spend on an article- is always being tracked. Sometimes it’s beneficial: smartphones with optimized battery charging settings can learn your charging routines and save energy over time.

But, there’s a lot of disinformation about what collected information is actually being used for. The internet is viewed as a void or black box. It’s impossible to know where anything we share ends up.

This is a PSA to remember your screens (Big Brother?) are always watching.