Or a personality/political profile could be built on a person from the shows they watch.
Or your social score could be reduced if you watch too many subversive shows. Oh but that's in China, and could never ever happen here, so no worries about building all the infrastructure to enable it. Except if you view terrorist content, then the UK feels justified in jailing you for 10-15 years [3]. But hey I don't think there's precedent yet for using smart TV fingerprinting for that, so why worry?
Lets give up our autonomy and privacy one tiny slice at a time. And when there is nothing left, you can point to each individual slice and explain to us how losing that one was totally insignificant and non-nefarious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...
Not only that but that cache of power, it's not available to you but it's probably available to rich people and governments, further exacerbating power divides. The power of information is insidious and grows as you gain more of it.
What does this mean?
The thing is, with "dragnet warrants" (see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...) it is incredibly easy for your data to end up subpoena'd by the police. Secret services may not even need that and simply take all the data they want. And at that time, your TV, phone or other device has effectively become an espionage device.
This is why the European GDPR focuses so hard on data minimization: data that doesn't even get collected or stored cannot be abused by criminals and the government.
It seems to me the only thing protecting these people would be claiming informed consent due to the dense EULA presented on activating the device. Im not really sure it would hold up in court though
These terms imply some kind of personal connection. The police will put a suspect under "surveillance". Someone might "spy" on their spouse to see if they're cheating.
These are the sorts of scenarios that these terms call to mind. These imply a deliberate and focused invasion of privacy by another person who is specifically looking to uncover and reveal some information that you want to keep secret, in order to use it against your interests.
This really has nothing to do with a computer system automatically collecting data on what TV shows you're watching and the vendor reselling this information in aggregate from millions of users (or, just using it to allow some other vendor to automatically and impersonally select an ad to show you, along with millions of other users in the same algorithmic category).
It's a false equivalency intended to manipulate your emotions into fearing a harm that does not exist. The reason they have to resort to this sort of technique is that they can't point to any actual harm from this practice that ordinary people would care about, so emotionally manipulative trickery is their only option.