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vrosasHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I used to work for an OTT DSP adtech company i.e

I used to work for an OTT DSP adtech company i.e. a company that bid on TV ad spots in real time. The bidding platform was handling millions of requests per second, and we were one of the smaller fish in the sea. This system is very real. Your tv is watching what you’re watching. I built the attribution pipeline, which is what this is. If you go buy a product from one of these ads, this is how they track (attribute) it. Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.

Original discussionTexas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch642 source comments · at import
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NI
nitwit005HN

That sounds so expensive it's hard to see it making money. You'd processing a 2fps video stream for each customer. That's a huge amount of data. And all that is for the chance to occasionally detect that someone's seen an ad in the background of a stream? Do any platforms even let a streamer broadcast an NFL game like the example given?

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KL
kleibaHN

> you have zero privacy Is this data linked to me personally in some way (e.g. though an account) or is it anonymous data?

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C1
c16HN

Would love to know what are the best things we can do to prevent this sort of tracking in general. PiHole? Don't re-use emails? On a scale of 1 to fucked are we cooked?

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EV
everdriveHN

This is really interesting. Can you expand on this? What are OTT and DSP in this context? Do you have a sense for what data is tracked and how it's used? Or if this sort of system is blind in certain cases? (eg: I hook up an N64 to the a/v ports -- will I get retro game ads on the TV?)

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AJ
AJ007HN

The TV thing isn't a new story, this was public. Everyone should have known about it and no one cared. (I could inset a boilerplate rant about Snowden here) Those datacenters are not being built so that you can talk to ChatGPT all day, they are being built to generate and optimize ads. People who were not previously very suggestible are going to be. People who are suggestible will have their agency sold off to the highest bidder. Avoid owning a TV? Your friends will. Maybe you can not have a FB/IG/WhatsApp account, only use cash, not have a mobile phone, but Meta (or Google, or Apple) can still detect your face in the background of photos/videos and know where you shop, travel and when.

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WI
wing-_-nutsHN

>Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy. Hence why I will never connect my TV to the internet

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SA
salawatHN

Soooo.... Why did you build it for them? You didn't have to further enable it. Despise people who just drop this kind of thing without any hint of repentance or contrition.

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