[BeetleB]

> Their devices take multiple screenshots of whatever is on your screen every second and then uploads those images to their servers to be scrutinized so that they can make assumptions about you as a person.

Source?

Also, do they do it only on Roku TVs, or even Roku devices like their sticks?

[autoexec]

> Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching. (https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...)

Note that this isn't documentation of their data collection practices, this is ad copy providing one example intended to convince advertisers to pay them. They mention TV but my guess is that this applies to every type of roku device, exploiting your data is how they make their money after all, although a stick is probably not capturing the screenshots in 4K. I would also assume that this applies to all content viewed on the device regardless of the app being used and including personal content cast to the device.

[medell]

You left the last sentence out of the paragraph from their ad copy. It doesn’t make their practices OK, but it’s important for those who don’t click through:

> We should note, however, that this data becomes aggregated, removing personally identifiable information before it is received by advertisers.

[autoexec]

It's not that important though, because depersonalized and even aggregated data can be traced back to a individual and even if roku doesn't hand that information along with your account details to advertisers roku themselves still have it all linked and can sell/leak that info to anyone at any time.

[avidiax]

Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), it's called, generically.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...

The TV makers don't need ACR when you are using apps on their OS. Those apps all report the currently playing title to the OS maker. ACR is used for when you watch broadcast TV or anything coming in over HDMI.

The margins on TVs are surprisingly small, so being able to show you a few dollars of ads every year dramatically improves that margin, which allows the TV to be either a better value or cheaper compared to other sets you see in the store.

[autoexec]

> The TV makers don't need ACR when you are using apps on their OS. Those apps all report the currently playing title to the OS maker.

That would just tell them what show you saw. With screenshots they can see what was on the screen when you paused the show, what scenes you rewound and re-watched or fast-forwarded through etc.

For example, if you pause a movie on a scene with boobs, they can assume you like boobs. Pause a lot on screens with text, they can assume you're a slow reader (with how long you tend to pause the screen indicating how much you struggle with reading). Maybe you're the kind of person who has to go back and rewatch scenes with heavy exposition or you like to watch violence and gore frame by frame, or you skip through certain shows just to get to the songs/musical numbers. Pause/rewind a lot and it might indicate that you're busy/distracted, but also that you care enough about what you're seeing that you don't just let the content play.

Even if they already have the title of the show being played, not collecting those twice a second screenshots when they have the ability to would be leaving a ton of data on the table.

[BeetleB]

From what I'm seeing, Roku's ACR does not "take multiple screenshots of whatever is on your screen every second", as claimed.

Furthermore, I'm not seeing whether they do this on their non-TV devices.

Edit: Seems the question is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39950370

[jonathanlydall]

It’s somewhat sickening, for essentially making pennies a month per user, all users of the TV have adverts inflicted upon them.

When I need to replace my TV, I will happily pay the extra 10s of dollars for one which will never do this.

[avidiax]

It's dollars per month. I have heard that Netflix is not charging enough for their ad-free tier to compensate the lost ad revenue.

Pricing an ad-free tier is a bit problematic. You would think that it should cost simply the ad-revenue per user more. However, since the more the ad free tier costs, the more advertisers would pay to reach those customers, the marginal ad revenue is higher. Someone on a hypothetical $30/mo ad-free tier has high disposable income, and is probably not being impressed by many ads already.