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What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

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Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#91

Post by qq66 »

lucisferre wrote: post #83
jasonwilk wrote: post #21

It's not worth buying any of these 'Smart' TVs. I don't know whether it is a shoddy developer experience provided by the likes of Samsung / Vizeo etc or if it's the developers themselves (Hulu I'm looking at you) who do not maintain their apps which are constantly bug filled. I much prefer my old dumb TV that has a Roku plugged into it. Oh yeah, and I know it's not WATCHING ME.

Actually the TV's with Roku built into it are great. But again how do you know the Roku isn't watching you? I mean it even has a mic for voice search.

Well, at least if you ascertain that the Roku is watching you, you can throw it out and only be out $50 instead of $500+ for the TV.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#92

Post by prebrov »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #60
ktta wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than avoiding such TVs, I think we're better off taking some good precautionary measures. Why buy commercial displays which usually are pretty expensive, when you can buy consumer ones and be smart about how you use it? Of course, even if they start coming with in-built wifi, just don't let them connect to anything. First, off taking control of your own home network is crucial. Get a good router, something you…

There's an absurd amount of technical knowledge that you are suggesting that every household in America should subscriber to. Also, if you have a SmartTV, you probably need to allow it contact the internet, otherwise playing internet TV (Netflix, iPlayer, Hulu, etc) is not going to work. If it can access Netflix, it can probably phone home with your data.

Not much technical knowledge required. Basic parental control on my ASUS router denies access to the internet to Samsung TV and it can still play content from LAN via UPnP.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#93

Post by pdimitar »

knite wrote: post #86
pdimitar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What proof do you have for what you're claiming, please? If you have intimate knowledge then you should know that many (me included) could accuse you of trying to push an agenda or divert the attention by posting what you did. How do you really know LG stopped their data collection? Sure they might have made a checkbox be switched off by default, but what does that say about the underlying software? IMO, nothing. It…

As a former Cognitive and Inscape employee, @mikeryan is largely correct. Note that fingerprinting happens on the TV - no actual content was sent back to us. Still absolutely creepy.* * Not the opinion of my (former) employer.

Once the data is sold, the cat is out of the bag. The service might not send sensitive info by itself but the DBs of the buyers might contain enough data for cross-referencing to personally identify you without a shadow of doubt.

As another poster here asked: were there any ethical discussions in the organization?

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#94

Post by pdimitar »

digikata wrote: post #88
pdimitar wrote: post #63

"Vizio has agreed to stop unauthorized tracking". As if there's any human-measurable way of confirming this. Yes they can be forced by a court. And no, the court can't know if they stopped all of the software copies on all TVs and no, the court can't know if they didn't re-activate them in the future back again. What actual proof do we have that LG actually stopped? What actual proof can we have that Vizio will stop…

Well, one could monitor all outgoing packets from your smart TV, but you would also need to know exactly how to decode what was contained those packets... unless of course they conveniently set the evil bit for you. With the poor level of development associated with this type of work, it would probably be enough to identify a different set servers for receiving the data. With more sophisticated coding, you really do…

I realize that a good router configuration (and a trusted router no less) might entirely eliminate the problem, but the thing is, there might be some other agreements between vendors we don't know about. For example, I have an ASUS router. I don't know if a Vizio TV can't send a packet to my router with which it gains unlimited and unfiltered net access. We simply don't know.

Anyway, probably my paranoia, but once you see things like the original post, you start to question a lot more. At least I do.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#95

Post by ben174 »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #90

So there was a setting to turn their tracking off if you dug into the menus. I turned it off on my set. I hope it covered that feature.

It's called Smart Interactivity and it's so far tucked away it's blatantly obvious they intended to hide it. As I recall it was in the 'System Reset' menu for some inexplicable reason.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#96

Post by mbesto »

Narkov wrote: post #26
passivepinetree wrote: post #15

The amount of money they made from that data is probably orders of magnitude more than the paltry $2.2 million penalty. I hate to get all paranoid, but it seems like every day there's news of a company's data being hacked, and what information isn't being hacked is being actively sold. What can an average citizen do (short of living Ron Swanson-style in a cabin in the woods) to protect their privacy?

"orders of magnitude more" ? As in, ~$200m? No chance. With a little bit of industry knowledge, I would posit that they made roughly the same quantum as the fine.

> Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content.

That type of technology alone would cost you at least $2M to build.

So either your statement is incorrect or Vizio got a terrible ROI on this (sans fine).

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#97

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

AJ007 wrote: post #55
mikeryan wrote: post #33

So I have a bit of intimate knowledge of this. Not sure what I can answer but for years my company worked on an Automatic Content Recognition project using tools from a team called Cognitive Networks who were bought by Vizio and makes up the tech that did this. If I understand correctly the founder of Vizio kept this tech for himself in the sale of Vizio. When developing this we would work directly with Cognitive che…

Thanks for posting this. When I saw the original FTC story I recalled reading about this once or twice in the past but couldn't think of any key phrases or sources. In response to some of the other comments here, basically what they are guilty of isn't spying but failing to properly disclose and opt-in users. There is a particular major AV vendor who is selling raw clickstream data of millions of their user's interne…

This is why i torrent behind a VPN despite being subscribed to HBO now, Netflix, and Amazon Video. My guilt is ameliorated and at least a sliver of ny privacy is maintained.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#98

Post by ipsin »

jeanvaljean2463 wrote: post #2

Huge schocker /s Pretty sure that Samsung does very similar things. I've been interested in actually capturing outgoing pcap data for this purpose. Looks like I have a new project to add the pile.

One thing that I'd treat as a "tell" for how invasive Samsung's tracking is: how hard is it to disable the Smart TV functionality?

For example, can you disable the wireless interface, or will it keep asking you to connect it to the internet? Does the TV itself ask you to agree to a EULA?

I've been interested in the Samsung hardware, but only as a Dumb TV. This kind of data collection is not what I'd want.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#99

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

pdimitar wrote: post #67
mikeryan wrote: post #33

So I have a bit of intimate knowledge of this. Not sure what I can answer but for years my company worked on an Automatic Content Recognition project using tools from a team called Cognitive Networks who were bought by Vizio and makes up the tech that did this. If I understand correctly the founder of Vizio kept this tech for himself in the sale of Vizio. When developing this we would work directly with Cognitive che…

What proof do you have for what you're claiming, please? If you have intimate knowledge then you should know that many (me included) could accuse you of trying to push an agenda or divert the attention by posting what you did. How do you really know LG stopped their data collection? Sure they might have made a checkbox be switched off by default, but what does that say about the underlying software? IMO, nothing. It…

Quick tip: If you actually care about being downvoted, dont complain about being downvoted. Many people will do so just for mentioning it, it is against the rules, and it's whining about imaginary, non-transferrable internet points

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#100

Post by pyre »

qq66 wrote: post #91
lucisferre wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the TV's with Roku built into it are great. But again how do you know the Roku isn't watching you? I mean it even has a mic for voice search.

Well, at least if you ascertain that the Roku is watching you, you can throw it out and only be out $50 instead of $500+ for the TV.

> TV's with Roku built into it

I'm guessing that this doesn't just mean that it comes in the same box as the tv set.

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