In Partnership with Major Brands, Publishers and Platforms, the Initiative will Usher in Innovative Privacy Protocols That Put Consumers in Control of their Data

SAN FRANCISCO – February 10, 2021 – Samba TV, the global leader in television data and omniscreen measurement, today announced the rollout of The Smart TV Privacy Manager, featuring progressive consumer protections within Smart TVs. The integration of the Privacy Manager, featuring the globally accepted IAB Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), is being rolled out in partnership with major global brands, publishers, and platforms to offer consumers industry-first privacy controls on Smart TVs.

The Samba TV Privacy Manager ushers in progressive privacy controls to bridge the Smart TV compliance gap by offering privacy solutions anchored in industry standards and formulated with TV manufacturers, industry governing bodies, and relevant governmental authorities. The easy-to-use interface is accessible within the TV’s settings menu and introduces a series of innovative new privacy controls that allow the consumer control over their household’s personal data in an unprecedented way.

Since its inception, Samba TV has been a proponent of the right to privacy and pioneered Smart TV opt-in and data protection policies in advance of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). The company is extending its workflows and user-interface to provide a full-featured consent management platform (CMP) for Smart TVs and has deployed it as an open standard that other players in the ecosystem can adopt at no cost.

“Long before global regulatory frameworks were introduced, consumer privacy has been a non-negotiable requirement of Samba TV’s partnerships with TV manufacturers, advertisers, and brands,” said Samba TV CEO and Co-founder Ashwin Navin. “It has been encouraging to see that government and self-regulatory bodies around the world have caught up to the 21st century and the complexity consumers face when making decisions on technology. We will continue to make transparency and choice central to our product decisions.”

Samba TV partnered with global TV manufacturers like Vestel, a world-leading TV manufacturer of brands like Toshiba and Hitachi, as the first to market with advanced consumer privacy measures across the user-friendly Privacy Manager.

“Enabling a personalized and high-quality experience for our consumers, while offering responsive privacy controls is pivotal to Vestel Group,” said Vestel Group Barış Altınkaya, VP of Product Management and Marketing. “Samba TV has always put privacy first in its technologies. We’re excited to be a part of this initiative to introduce these heightened consumer controls for our consumers to manage their privacy choices.”

Samba TV has traditionally offered essential consumer privacy controls even before they were legally mandated, including allowing the consumer to enable or disable the collection of viewership information at any time, opt-out of the sale of personal data, and exercise fundamental privacy rights.

In addition to these standard privacy controls, the Privacy Manager addresses the issue of filling compliance gaps with third-party Smart TV advertising by integrating the IAB TCF with world-wide TV platforms and making that framework available to publishers and ad vendors. In addition, Samba TV is going one step further in the U.S. to implement a similar framework that addresses the challenges of the CCPA and CPRA.

These innovative privacy controls are important to publishers and brands as they work across borders on millions of Smart TVs to offer consumers impactful advertising without compromising privacy.

For compliance with the IAB TCF in Europe, Samba TV is partnered with Sourcepoint, the privacy compliance platform for the digital marketing ecosystem and a certified member of the IAB EU.

“The data privacy landscape is complex, but our goal is to make it simpler for the digital marketing ecosystem to gain control of their standards and ensure compliance on all channels,” commented Ben Barokas, Co-Founder and CEO at Sourcepoint. “We’re excited to partner with Samba TV on this initiative to better serve the industry and facilitate stronger digital citizenship.”

“Samba TV Privacy Manager is a breakthrough for privacy protection on connected TVs (CTVs),” said Leigh Freund, President and CEO of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the leading self-regulatory association for the ad-tech industry. “The industry should embrace a clear, intuitive process to give consumers transparency and granular choices about the use of their viewing data, as CTVs are increasingly becoming an important platform for digital advertising. We look forward to working with Samba TV and other industry members to integrate this approach with governing frameworks in the U.S.”

About Samba TV

Samba TV enables the next generation TV experience powered by its first-party data, helping viewers engage with relevant media and empowering brand marketers to quantify that engagement. Samba TV’s insights are built on the world’s most comprehensive source of real-time viewership data across broadcast, cable, over-the-top, and digital media. Invented in 2011, Samba TV’s ACR is integrated at the chipset level across 20 of the top Smart TV brands globally (the most in the industry) analyzing the content on screen in real-time, regardless of source. Samba TV delivers unbiased, comprehensive viewership data addressable through more than a billion devices around the world. The world’s leading brands leverage Samba TV to quantify media investments and amplify them across all the screens we use to watch video. For more information, please visit www.samba.tv.