Your living room TV might soon be doing double duty as an AI data harvester. Web data aggregator Bright Data has been quietly pitching streaming service operators on a controversial monetization scheme - turning millions of Samsung and LG smart TVs into web crawlers that scrape data for AI training. The proposal, which targets apps running on Samsung's Tizen and LG's webOS platforms, promises streaming services an alternative revenue stream without ads or subscription fees. But it raises serious questions about whether consumer hardware should be repurposed for commercial data collection without explicit consent.
The smart TV in your living room could be crawling the web for AI companies right now, and you might never know it. Bright Data, a controversial web scraping firm that supplies training data to AI companies, has been approaching streaming service operators with an unusual pitch - let us turn your apps into data collection nodes, and we'll pay you for it.
The proposal specifically targets apps running on Samsung's Tizen and LG's webOS smart TV platforms, according to a report from Janko Roettgers' Lowpass newsletter published in The Verge. Instead of bombarding viewers with ads or charging premium subscription fees, streaming services could monetize their user base by allowing Bright Data to harness the collective processing power of millions of TVs to scrape websites and gather data.
Bright Data has built a massive business around what it calls "ethical web data collection," operating proxy networks that route web scraping traffic through millions of devices worldwide. The company claims its services help businesses gather competitive intelligence and train AI models. But critics see something darker - a surveillance infrastructure that conscripts consumer hardware into commercial espionage without meaningful consent.
The smart TV angle represents a new frontier for this business model. TVs sit idle for hours each day, connected to high-speed internet and powerful enough to run background processes. From Bright Data's perspective, that's wasted computing capacity. From a privacy standpoint, it's your living room device secretly visiting websites and collecting data while you sleep.
