As streaming services proliferate, so does the technology that tracks their viewers. AT&T, Roku, and ad giant Publicis, among others, are harvesting viewers’ email addresses and the devices they use to stream content. Privacy advocates are concerned, with Center for Digital Democracy executive director Jeff Chester calling the practice a “digital daisy chain of data-gathering on viewers.” But advertisers find the opportunity to gather the specific data available with streaming services too appealing to pass up. Continue reading Advertisers Turn to Streaming Services for More User Data

Both IBM and Google recently advanced development of Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems to create high-quality digital speech. OpenAI found that, since 2012, the compute power needed to train TTS models has exploded to more than 300,000 times. IBM created a much less compute-intensive model for speech synthesis, stating that it is able to do so in real-time and adapt to new speaking styles with little data. Google and Imperial College London created a generative adversarial network (GAN) to create high-quality synthetic speech. Continue reading Google and IBM Create Advanced Text-to-Speech Systems

Princeton University and University of Chicago researchers studied over 2,000 channels on streaming devices Amazon Fire TV and Roku — and found that 89 percent of the Fire TV channels and 69 percent of Roku channels included trackers. Those trackers collect data on viewing habits and preferences, device serial numbers and IDs, Wi-Fi network names and MAC (media access control) addresses, which are network interface identifiers. Some channels had 64+ different tracks. Users have no tools to examine the traffic or block ads. Continue reading Researchers Find Fire TV, Roku Channels Are Tracking Data