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What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

ftc.gov

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Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#111

Post by pdimitar »

andrewflnr wrote: post #106
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…

What proof could they actually provide? Given the medium, anything they said is probably easily forgeable or illegal to share. That being the case, demanding proof is just a way for you to look "skeptical" without providing much of value to the conversation. I'm guessing you meant well, but apparently others thought differently. We all know people lie on the internet sometimes. We can't explicitly bring up the possib…

I don't disagree with anything you said. It's just that this is a high-profile case (IMO anyway). I guess I am expecting too much.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#113

Post by nikmobi »

cracell wrote: post #85
awfgylbcxhrey wrote: post #81

Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. I would like to know more about that process. I find it ethically abhorrent, but technically very interesting. Like, is it grabbing, say, three pixels in constant locations across the screen and matching their color change over time? Is it examining a whole block? Is it averaging a block at some pro…

I'm also curious if they'd be able to match different encodings of the same video or would only be able to match against specific encodings in their collection.

I would imagine it's simply a temporal comparison of pixel colors at predetermined locations, similar to how the Shazam algorithm[1] works? You'd just need to analyze enough pixels to reduce "collisions", coupled with the temporal aspect!

[1] https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#114

Post by tucif »

pdimitar wrote: post #78
fencepost wrote: post #47

This sounds like an excellent reason to simply never connect the TV to the Internet and to simply connect your own system to the TV whether it be a stick PC or something with a little more oompf.

That's what I plan to do but it still makes me nervous that the "smart" part of the TV might secretly contact my router and ask for network access. I have zero proof but I became paranoid recently. :( The reasonable tradeoff would be to buy a high-quality "dumb" TV with a very good screen. At least I hope so.

> Ask for network access Assuming you have a decent router that supports wpa2 I find it difficult to believe a TV would crack it.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#115

Post by knite »

pdimitar wrote: post #93
knite wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Individually yes, organizationally not that I know of.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#116

Post by mirkules »

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…

Is it possible to bring about a similar complaint against Facebook with the FTC? Or, if the FTC is the wrong agency, what would be the right one?

Of particular concern are "shadow profiles" - dossiers on people who have never even used or consented to using Facebook[1]. I'm no lawyer, but there could be precedent per this Vizio case.

In my opinion Facebook is hugely overstepping people's privacy bounds, even if they do bury what they do with some of the data in their terms of service. I never even knew about DeepFace, or mouse cursor movements, or any of the multitudes of violations of privacy outlined in the article below, and frankly it scares me and makes me angry.

[1]http://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this/

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#117

Post by Neliquat »

tucif wrote: post #114
pdimitar wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I plan to do but it still makes me nervous that the "smart" part of the TV might secretly contact my router and ask for network access. I have zero proof but I became paranoid recently. :( The reasonable tradeoff would be to buy a high-quality "dumb" TV with a very good screen. At least I hope so.

> Ask for network access Assuming you have a decent router that supports wpa2 I find it difficult to believe a TV would crack it.

Agreed, but. Most just bug you about 'updates' ad nausem until you have a moment of weakness and punch it in. At least some will autoconnect to open wifi. Sure YOURS is locked down, but what about your neighbors? Just 'turning it "off"' is not enough for even casual security.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#118

Post by bredren »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #76
Narkov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

So basically, it pays to engage in unethical behavior, because if you do get caught, the fine will usually not be more than the profit you made from said behavior.

Obviously. Whatsapp broke privacy law in Canada and across Europe to hack growth. Different industry, but Four Loko also was penalized for its risky (but great for some people) original formula.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#120

Post by ohyes »

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…

> I had an interesting case with Instagram where after viewing enough pictures of women's butts it started also showing men's bare butts in my feed too.. at least until I never opened any of them, and they disappeared.

This truly is technology run amok. "Welcome to buttstagram, for your butt viewing pleasure."

When I think about this situation it makes me want to stay entirely away from social media and off the internet. Yet it's ubiquity in our lives makes it difficult to be integrated and participant in society without the technology. And a lot of the features really do disappear when you remain entirely anonymous (via tor, incognito, not having accounts etc).

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