Your smart TV may be crawling the web for AI

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

These days, if you sign up for a new streaming service, you generally have two options: Either pay a massive premium for an ad-free experience, or endure frequent commercial breaks and all the sneaky tracking that comes with ad targeting.

Web data aggregator Bright Data has been pitching streaming service operators on an alternative approach for apps running on Samsung’s Tizen and LG’s webOS platform — one that comes without ads and sky-high fees. All publishers have to do to unlock a new revenue source is integrate the company’s Bright SDK into their TV apps and convince viewers to opt into Bright’s monetization network.

“We don’t do any kind of tracking,” explained Bright Data’s chief product officer, Ariel Shulman, during a webinar for streaming industry insiders two years ago. “We work silently in the background, and completely anonymously. Users don’t actually see or don’t feel anything.”

The catch? With Bright’s SDK, a viewer’s smart TV becomes part of a massive global proxy network that crawls and scrapes the web. Including apps running on desktop PCs and mobile devices, the company claims to operate 150 million such residential proxies worldwide. Together, these devices gather petabytes of public web data from a wide range of different locations and IP addresses. This approach allows the company to capture localized versions of websites, but also helps to circumvent web crawler blacklists. The gathered data is then resold to companies to