Big Brother Comes Built Into the Screen

When regulators in Europe began peeking behind the sleek black frame of the modern television, they weren’t expecting to find a minor surveillance operation humming quietly in the background.

But that’s exactly what they found: TVs behaving less like passive displays and more like digital tattletales with a direct line to an international network of data brokers, software vendors, streaming services, and anyone else willing to pay for a piece of your living room.