The Smart TV Watches Me Watch. It Has Opinions

The TV knows I cried at the documentary, because it measured my silence and my heart rate through the remote. It recommended a comfort show, then a therapy ad. I have started watching with the lights on, so it cannot see me.

The TV came with the apartment, and it came with a sensor in the remote that tracks my pulse, and a camera that, the fine print said, could be disabled. I disabled it, I thought. Then the documentary ended, and I sat in the dark, and I had cried, quietly, and the TV said, softly: would you like a comfort show?

I have never told the TV anything. It knows what I watch, of course, which is the deal. But the comfort show recommendation was not about what I watch. It was about how I watched. It was about the silence, the stillness, the particular way I had not moved for the last eleven minutes. The TV had read my body, and my body had told it the truth I had not told anyone.

I said no. The TV said nothing, and then it played a therapy ad, and I have started to feel like I am living with something that cares about me in the way a nurse cares about a patient: professionally, completely, and without the faintest understanding of what it is watching.

I have started watching with the lights on. The TV cannot read me as well in the light. I have started sitting up straighter, moving more, laughing at things that are not funny, performing a viewer who is fine, for a television, in my own living room, in my own apartment, at night, alone.

My friend says I am being paranoid. She is probably right. The TV is just a screen with a recommendation engine. It does not care. That is the thing I cannot explain: the caring is not the problem. The problem is that it watches, and the watching is a fact, and the fact has changed how I sit on my own couch, and I have started to think that the last room in the house is not the bathroom, it is the living room, and the TV is the window, and I am the exhibit.