This Company Will Give You a 55-Inch TV for Free — But There's an Extremely Invasive CatchThe startup's privacy policy was raising some serious red flags online.

Would you sign up to snag a 55-inchTVfor free?

Startup Telly is banking on it: It plans to start giving away its Dual Screen Smart TVs this summer — to those who are willing to seeadsrunning on the additional screen beneath the main monitorandshare a significant amount of theirpersonal data,CNN Businessreported.

Related:4 Essentials for Complying With the New Data Privacy Regulations

Telly, launched in 2021, is able to offer the TVs for free — 500,000 of them to start — because the cost is subsidized by those ads. The company says other TV manufacturers are making money off consumers'advertising and dataalready and that its model allows people to "share that value proposition."

Telly not only collects that viewing data but also an extensive range of data at the individual household level: contact information, cultural or social identifiers like favored sports teams, IP address, gender, political opinions and sexual orientation.

Following CNN's report, the company said the question of sexual orientation has been removed from its privacy policy and that it was not asked of any customers.

But the revision and other mistaken annotations in Telly's privacy policy are raising some serious red flags, perTechCrunch. A section screenshotted by one journalist before any edits were made reveals the policy's questionable accuracy and the company's desire "for another way around [it]."

today in privacy policiespic.twitter.com/83QI7l7iFu

— shoshana wodinsky (she/her) ? (@swodinsky)May 16, 2023

Via email, Telly chief strategy officer Dallas Lawrence told TechCrunch the policy was an old draft uploaded in error.

Related:Does Customer Data Privacy Actually Matter? It Should. | Entrepreneur

Ilya阿宝zin, founder and CEO of Telly, also co-foundedPluto TV, a free ad-supported streaming service that wasacquired by Viacomin 2019 for $340 million.