Reality Check: Marketers Can Hear Your TV — But Not How You Might Think
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There’s been a lot of talk in the past few weeks about electronic appliances capturing data for surveillance purposes. But can marketers access this type of data?
In an interview published March 12, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, suggested that his campaign may have been spied on via televisions or microwaves. Her comments alluded to baseless accusations by President Trump himself that the Obama administration “wiretapped” his campaign. Also this month, documents about CIA hacking practices exposed through Wikileaks have raised questions about the spy agency using Samsung televisions to gather room audio through a TV-remote microphone.
While the concept of microwave oven-as-snooping-device has been debunked, the swirling rumors do prompt questions about what types of audio data-capturing capabilities televisions have and whether marketers have access to such TV audio data. It turns out a massive amount of TV audio data is made available to marketers, but not necessarily the kind we’d read about in a modern day Ian Fleming novel.
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