Somebody is watching and tracking your every move online

Guess what , the majority of your streaming and entertainment devices are watching and tracking you even when you tell them not to.

By Now most people are aware that the digital Advertising ecosystem tracks you across the web, building a composite profile to more effectively target and deliver ads your way. New data and research shows the way into the most popular streaming video services and devices with tools built into the devices.

Research from Princeton University and the University of Chicago detailed the tracking that happens behind the scenes in over 2,000 channels on Roku and Amazon Fire TV streaming devices. The researchers bought different models of the streaming sticks and built a tool to monitor and analyze their network traffic to see the data coming to—and more importantly, going from—the devices.

They found that 89 percent of Amazon Fire TV channels and 69 percent of Roku channels contained easily spottable trackers that collected information about a viewing habits and preferences, along with unique identifiers like device serial numbers and IDs, Wi-Fi network names, and the Wi-Fi identifiers known as MAC addresses.

What’s worse is that there is very little that you or anyone can do to stop these incursions into your habits, data and lives.