That box on your TV would have been a Nielsen box which sat on your TV and was connected to your landline. It didn’t collect anything automatically: every time you turned the TV on you were contractually obligated to press a button every 20 minutes to have the box call Nielsen and log a datapoint.
Those boxes have been phased out in favour of “Personal People Meters”[0], which are basically a pager with a SIM card that you wear which has a microphone listening 24/7 for TV broadcasts. You must keep it on you, listening at all times.
Nielsen will pay you $250/year (less than a dollar a day) for the data you provide.
Surely what matters is the architecture:
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Waymo tell us that fleet response agents can only provide waypoint suggestions, they don't have steer-by-wire remote control of the vehicle.