Nexstar Insider: The Company is Tracking You

A while back, FTVLive wrote about Nexstar and their streaming app.

After that post we heard from a Nexstar insider and what the company plans are when it comes to tracking their users.

Here are the claims the insider made in an email to FTVLive.

The mandatory login system that Nexstar now forces on users across its websites and apps is about much more than just agreeing to privacy policies or giving up your right to sue. This is really about building detailed personal profiles by connecting all your online activity together—and users have little choice but to comply if they want access to local news.

Before these login requirements existed, Nexstar collected tracking data differently. When you downloaded their news app, visited their website, used their Fire TV app, or interacted with any of their other platforms, each one tracked you separately. Every device and platform created its own anonymous ID with information attached to it. But these IDs couldn't be connected to each other. If you used three different devices, Nexstar's system saw you as three different people. This at least provided some level of privacy protection.

Now, by requiring an email address to log in, Nexstar has engineered a way to strip away that separation and link all these separate pieces together. Your email becomes the surveillance thread that ties everything to you as one person. That viewing session on your TV, the morning news you checked on your phone, the articles you read on your laptop, and your visits to sites like The Hill—all of this can now be monitored and recognized as coming from the same individual.

This combined data makes advertising intrusive and highly profitable. Companies can now target ads to you personally across every device you own, following you throughout your day. They're not just guessing based on broad categories anymore. They can see your specific habits, what content you prefer, when you watch or read, and how you move between devices. This unified information is worth far more money to advertisers than scattered bits of data—which is exactly why Nexstar is forcing this system on people who just want to watch their local news.

What's particularly concerning is that Nexstar is planning to expand how this login system gets used. They're working on bringing back comment sections on The Hill, and you'll need to use the same login to participate. This means even your comments and community interactions will feed more information into your personal profile. Every opinion you share, every topic you engage with, becomes another data point to be packaged and monetized. The company is essentially holding access to local news and civic participation hostage in exchange for extensive personal data collection.