If you look into SmartTV software, they have all kinds of applications (i.e. GraceNote) feeding back your viewing/surfing history and then providing you ads based on such. I prefer to not participate in their data collection and definitely don't enjoy ads, so I just disable all of that and use an STB like Apple TV that doesn't have that. Sure Apple has it's own ads, but they're far less intrusive (you only see them if you open the App Store where it suggests apps). Is Apple collecting data about me, yeah, probably...but I trust them with my data far more than pretty much any major company, and definitely more than outfits like Google, Amazon, etc. who's primary revenue stream is using your date. Or in the case of GraceNote: *selling* your data to unknown companies.