Facebook and Google have ad trackers on your streaming TV, studies find

Found on Ars Technica on Sunday, 22 September 2019
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Modern TV, coming to you over the Internet instead of through cable or over the air, has a modern problem: all of your Internet-connected streaming devices are watching you back and feeding your data to advertisers.

The most prevalent tracker, Google's doubleclick.net, showed up in 975 of the top 1,000 Roku channels, with Google analytics trackers showing up in 360, the researchers found. Over on the Amazon side of things, perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon trackers were the most prevalent, showing up in 687 of 1,000 channels. Doubleclick trackers were found on 307 channels, and Facebook trackers were on 196.

Tracking not only includes sending information about video titles, which you might expect, but also permanent device identifiers and wireless SSID information, the researchers found.

Theoretically, in your home network, you could control DNS requests and use something like Pi-hole to keep trackers dead. If it wouldn't be for Mozilla and Google who push hard to enforce DNS over HTTPS (DoH) instead of supporting the already existing DNS over TLS (DoT) to encrypt requests. The reason? Blocking HTTPS results in way more colateral damage than blocking DNS so it is supposed to be "safer" for the user; but in fact it's just about removing another level of control from the user.