![]() But in fact, the purpose of that tracking is more oriented towards serving up advertising on main – and on secondary – screens. One of the key points that caused privacy advocates to target Samba TV, is that their opt-in language seemed to suggest they were tracking your viewing habits in order to feed you related content recommendations. It is for this reason, certain members of Congress saw the need to step in. However, what really set off some concerns among privacy activists, is that Samba TV can even track, recommend, and deliver advertising on a second device connected to the same homeowners network.Īs this news emerged and was vigorously debated some time back, it became clear that other companies, including major manufacturers such as Vizio, were also tracking consumers viewing habits using different software – but with equally potentially deceptive opt-in information that was not always clear. Recently, there was a flare-up over a company called Samba TV, which is a software package that Smart TV makers build into their TVs that tracks user viewing in order to make suggestions for related content, and of course, to also serve up advertising ostensibly relevant to their preferences. The senators believe that federal regulators should investigate “the business practices of smart-television manufacturers” whom they believe are “tracking consumers’ viewing behavior without their knowledge.” Senators Edward J Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sent a letter last week to Joseph Simons, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they were concerned about “consumer privacy issues raised by the proliferation of smart-TV technology,” according to a report by the New York Times. On that note, the command to disable the Samba feature is as follows.U.S. This, will of course, require the user to activate developer permissions on the TV, and have somewhat knowledge of how to connect and issue ADB commands. In the worst case scenario, another redditor on the same thread offers an ADB-based way to fix the issue. With the easy fix suggestion being to enable the feature first, upgrade, then disable once again after upgrading. ![]() According to the Reddit post where this was recently noted, however, those who experience this warning prompt are likely to of already had the feature disabled when upgrading. Although disabling may lead to another issue where warning prompts repeatedly show up on the screen advising that the feature is disabled. For those users, this is a feature that can be disabled through the settings (as shown in the image below). However, as is the case with user privacy in general, it stands to reason that many device owners will likely not want such software running in the background and making a note of their viewing habits, regardless of the reason or benefit. The software is supposedly there to improve the experience by making it a more personal one. So while it is currently unclear as to whether users are seeing a fresh version now showing up, or only noticing the installed software for the first time, it is worth all Sony Android TV owners being aware that this software is likely to be present on the system. ![]() As Sony has for a long time used Samba software on its TVs and even before it started using Android TV as the underlying software. To be clear, this is not a new thing as many device owners have reported the inclusion of Samba on a Sony-branded TV long before the Android Nougat update started rolling out.
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