Investigating HbbTV Privacy Invasiveness Across European Countries

Abstract

Smart TVs enable the integration of the traditional broadcast signal with services offered by the Internet. Specifically, the Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) protocol allows broadcasters to offer consumers additional features via the Internet (e.g., quizzes and the ability to restart programs), enriching their viewing experience. For broadcasters its bi-directional nature also enables them to measure viewing preferences and provide targeted advertisements (marketed as “Addressable TV”). HbbTV works using standard web technologies as transparent overlays over a TV channel, thus, porting web security and privacy concerns to the Smart TV. However, despite the increasing adoption of HbbTV worldwide, studies on security and privacy issues in its deployments are scarce.

In this paper, we discuss how we tested a range of 36 channels across five European countries and which challenges we faced; Specifically, every country adopts different ways of delivering the broadcast signal to the TVs. Thus, we provide a common experiment setup and detailed instructions on how we assess the TV channels’ privacy level in each country. We also show how the URLs pointing to the HbbTV applications we extracted can foster further replicability and studies. Finally, to complement our technical experiments we also measured Italian users’ awareness (N=174) of the security and privacy risks HbbTV introduces and we discuss our methodology to do so.