Smart TVs Become Hidden Infrastructure in AI's Data Economy

AI companies' insatiable demand for training data has created an economic incentive for residential proxy networks to leverage consumer devices—particularly Smart TVs that operate 24/7—as unwitting data-collection infrastructure. While illegal botnets have drawn regulatory scrutiny, the "legal" consent-based model employed by companies like Bright Data has largely escaped public attention despite enabling data harvesting at comparable scale. For consumers, this exposes a critical vulnerability in IoT privacy: where embedded SDKs claiming user consent effectively repurpose home broadband for corporate AI training purposes without genuine user awareness.