Roku City, the oddly alluring cityscape screen saver, scrolls across millions of idle TVs every day. Recently, an island paradise appeared in the picture. In the foreground, a floating billboard invited me to subscribe to Disney and watch Moana 2 at the press of a button on my remote. The convenience, I don’t mind about the new era of ad-supported everything. The wiretapping, I do.

Ads are obviously not new on TV. As long as we’ve been watching shows on glowing boxes, we’ve been watching commercials that provide the economic engine for the entire entertainment factory to operate. While streaming platforms offered a reprieve for a few years by charging monthly fees for commercial-free content, it’s now practically impossible to watch TV without seeing some sort of marketing. What’s happening more under the radar is that your TV is collecting data about you and your watching habits — sometimes by directly monitoring what’s on your screen — and serving you personalized ads on your TV or elsewhere.

The screen that you once loved for private, uninterrupted Netflix-watching has become a big billboard that also spies on you.

This isn’t just a Roku problem, although the company found itself in hot water when some users were recently required to watch a video ad — a Moana 2 trailer — before they could access their TV’s home screen at all. Roku says this is just a test, but the fact that it’s similar to a feature Amazon rolled out over a year ago on Prime Video suggests that ads are generally getting more brazen on streaming platforms. How you feel about it depends a lot on your mindset and feelings about privacy.

Your TV wants your data

The TV business traditionally included three distinct entities. There’s the hardware, namely the TV itself; the entertainment, like movies and shows; and the ads, usually just commercials that interrupt your movies and shows. In the streaming era, tech companies want to control all three, a setup also known as vertical integration. If, say, Roku makes the TV, supplies the content, and sells the ads, then it stands to control the experience, set the rates, and make the most money. That’s business!

Roku has done this very well. Although it was founded in 2002, Roku broke into the market in 2008 after Netflix invested $6 million in the company to make a set-top box that enabled any TV to stream Netflix content. It was literally called the Netflix Player by Roku. Over the course of the next 15 years, Roku would grow its hardware business to include streaming sticks, which are basically just smaller set-top-boxes; wireless soundbars, speakers, and subwoofers; and after licensing its operating system to third-party TV makers, its own affordable, Roku-branded smart TVs.

While most people think of Roku as a hardware company, it........

© Vox