There’s a startup called Telly that’s flipping the game and planning to give away FREE 55 Inch TVs this summer. But here’s the catch—it comes with another screen dedicated for ads only and capturing a whole bunch of your personal data. I mean, it’s a small price to pay for a free TV, right?
So, Telly, launched in 2021, has come up with a genius idea. They can offer these TVs for free—yeah, you heard me right—500,000 FREE 55 Inch TVs to start! And how do they pull off this magic trick? Well, they subsidize the cost with those sneaky ads that’ll be running on the secondary screen. They claim that other TV manufacturers are already making bank off your data and advertising, so why not let you in on the action? They call it a “value proposition” that you can totally get on board with.
Telly isn’t just interested in what you watch on TV. Oh no, they want to know everything about you. And I mean everything. They collect data at the individual household level, from your contact information to cultural or social identifiers like your favorite sports teams. And let’s not forget your IP address, gender, political opinions, and even your sexual orientation. Yeah, it’s a bit intrusive, to say the least.
But don’t worry, after CNN Business reported on this, Telly did a little backtrack dance. They removed the whole sexual orientation question from their privacy policy and claimed they never asked customers about it in the first place. Hmm, sounds fishy, right?
And here’s where things get even sketchier, according to TechCrunch. They did some detective work and found some serious red flags in Telly’s privacy policy. Screenshots of an old draft revealed inaccuracies and hints of the company wanting to find loopholes.
The founder and CEO of Telly, Ilya Pozin, also happens to be the mastermind behind Pluto TV, a free streaming service with ads. Oh, and guess what? Viacom aquired Pluto TV by for a whopping $340 million in 2019. Talk about making bank, right?
The question is would you be willing to let Telly invade your privacy for a chance to score a fancy new FREE 55 Inch TV?
