When you cut the cable cord and opt for streaming services—such as Hulu, Sling TV, or Amazon Prime Video—your wallet absolutely stands to benefit.
But what about your digital privacy?
New research has shown that these streaming apps expose your data to advertisers, trackers, and other third parties.
So are the economic savings of cable decentralization worth the potential privacy and security risks?
Fast Company covered the new findings:
Such is the inherent trade-off with streaming video over the internet: With so many different apps, each with their own array of tracking and advertising mechanisms, figuring out what's happening to your data becomes practically impossible to understand.
Unless streaming TV platforms intervene in a meaningful way, users will have little ability to control where their viewing data goes.
"Trackers are getting access to what you're watching, and how long you spend time on certain programs," says Hooman Mohajeri Moghaddam, one of the Princeton researchers who worked on the study. "So basically, it's another dimension of data that's added to your profile."
