| While I completely agree with your comment, it also omits something that just serves to underscore your point that consumers make assumptions about how things (economically) work. > They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises. Your example switches from "I pay <somebody> that enables access to <somebody else>" and you don't even have to go that far. The guide channel is not tracking her viewing habits, but her cable box certainly is. The industry term is Addressable Media[1], and if she has any modern cable box from any major provider then she's being tracked and targeted for targeted ads just as highly as Facebook would be, despite her paying her cable company for the privilege of watching it. And while it's not customizing the programming itself that she watches, it is customizing the ads she's seeing. It's effectively the same as Facebook, where the she's using whatever is on offer and being subtly influenced by highly targeted excerpts being interspersed into it. Ever experience weird glitches for commercials that start and end almost immediately, or randomly lack sound or any number of weird quirks that would make you think "man, someone just spent a lot of money for a messed up commercial spot, how did that get passed QA/QC?!"... chances are that was just a hiccup for you specifically as your cable box dynamically inserted an ad, and not hardcoded as part of the wider broadcast. Cell phones are the same. Even though you're paying the cell company for network access, they're also double dipping by selling targeted audience capabilities based on their data of you based on ads that are seen while using their network. [1] https://martechtoday.com/addressable-tv-state-cross-device-a... |