PriMSED - Privacy-friendly measurement of Smart Entertainment Devices

Smart Entertainment Devices (SEDs) are a subclass of Consumer Electronics (CE) devices and can be found in almost every household. SEDs have interfaces to communicate with other parties, e.g., other SEDs in the local network, third parties in the Internet or vendors. Examples of SEDs are Smart TVs, Bluray players, gaming consoles and many more. It becomes more important for vendors and third parties to get detailed information how, and in which environment, devices are used. Vendors could process such data so that the improvement process of SEDs or products related to SEDs can be optimized. Advertisement companies, for example, can use the data to personalize the content delivered to SEDs in order to improve their revenues. In the context of TVs, audience measurement systems are used to determine how many people are watching a specific TV program. Those systems are not able to collect environment information, e.g., in which configuration a SED is used, how many devices are deployed in a household or which devices are used in parallel. Furthermore, consumers cannot see which data is gathered by the audience measurement systems and then transferred to the companies. In this work, we show a concept and a prototype implementation how SEDs can be measured including environment information. We discuss technical requirements needed for accurate measurement and an approach to present the data in an understandable way to consumers. They have the possibility to limit the data shared with third parties or the vendors. Moreover, we give some methods to prevent privacy issues while sharing data with other parties. Finally, we provide an outlook how our concept and implementation can be further improved.