but at what cost?
Apr 20, 2025
Let’s be blunt: your smart TV isn’t just watching what you watch. Now it’s trying to read your feelings.
LG just announced a deal with Zenapse, a company that uses AI to analyze viewers' emotions, beliefs, and values. The goal? Hyper-personalized ads that don’t just target you—they understand you.
Through Zenapse’s tech, LG TVs will start grouping users into segments like “emotionally engaged planners” or “digital adopters,” all to serve emotionally tuned ads across homescreens, FAST channels, and beyond.It’s the start of a new era in advertising. But it’s also a turning point for privacy.
Relevance vs. respect
Zenapse’s ZenVision system builds its emotional models using everything from show scripts to your viewing behavior. It watches how you watch, then feeds that data into a profile advertisers can target.
It’s a clever system. But it’s also uncomfortably intimate.
BOOTLOADER'S PATH
Emotion with boundaries
We see the same future LG sees—emotion-aware interfaces, experiences that respond to how you feel. But we believe there’s a right way to do it.
At Bootloader, we follow three principles:
1. On-device first. Always. No emotion data leaves your device. Not for analysis, not for ads. Your mood stays yours.
2. Inference, not intrusion. Our AI, like Pawz, guesses how you feel based on local signals—but you stay in control. Again, everything is on-device.
3. We don't build dossiers. We build delight. We design tech that reacts to you—not that tracks you.
And we’re not alone. Apple’s Vision Pro takes the same approach: rich emotional context, processed privately on-device. That’s the ecosystem we align with—and it’s the one users are learning to trust.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
A smarter future, without the creep factor
Emotion-aware UX is coming. But it doesn’t have to come at the cost of autonomy. When every device is racing to understand you, we’re building tech that respects you.
We don't build dossiers. We build delight.
That's the Bootloader way.
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