It seems to be related to some advertising push from a partner named Alfonso that is gathering information cross-platform anything that appears on your screen and pushing advertising to you during playback.
Hopefully not, but that’s what it looks like from early reading.
Yes from a hardware and user experience perspective, and a more pessimistic maybe/not really from a privacy perspective. I think smart TVs are a little more aggressive with their anti user changes because they see it as a captive audience. They market the hardware specs, then add ads to the UI. Streaming sticks really only have their user interface and user experience to market, so they’re a little less aggressive with the negative changes.