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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

#131

Post by gregmac »

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.

I like to frame it this way: The oldest TV in my house is a 10+ years old 46" 'dumb' TV. It used to have a SageTV box connected, then a Roku, and now currently has a Chromecast. I could plug the Chromecast into a brand new TV, and other than the case design, they'd be indistinguishable.

Know what was state-of-the-art in embedded CPUs 10 years ago? The original iPhone. It had a 400 MHz single-core processor with 128MB RAM. Do you think app developers that have quad- and octo-core CPUs and literally 8 or 16 times the memory are going to optimize for the old platform, or build and maintain several versions of their applications?

Personally I'd rather spend of $35 ~ $200 every few years, instead of $800 ~ $2000, to have an up-to-date system.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#132

Post by dzdt »

swsieber wrote: post #50
JohnBooty wrote: post #42

If nobody's started one yet, I think there would be an audience for a blog/vlog/whatever that reviews non-smart TVs. And/or a place that evaluates which "smart" TVs function acceptably as "dumb" when they are not connected to a network. Realistically, this would have to include evaluating things beside consumer TVs for use as living room devices, since "smart" features in consumer TVs are nearly unavoidable at this p…

I'd also like non-smart Blu-ray players. Well, speaking over HDMI is okay, but no internet crap.

Internet crap is a required part of the Blu-ray standard.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#133

Post by hueving »

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…

>here is a particular major AV vendor who is selling raw clickstream data of millions of their user's internet usage directly to marketers and other parties right now. As far as I can tell, as long as it is buried somewhere in the terms and conditions no one cares.

ugh. Name them please! If it's in the ToS they shouldn't mind being called out.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#134

Post by djsumdog »

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…

Not to mention non-disclosure agreements and such.

What I want to know is, how did Vizio get caught? Was there a whistle blower. This article doesn't mention (unless I just missed it) how the FTC discovered this.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#135

Post by hueving »

Archio wrote: post #64
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…

I'm curious, did anyone on your team raise any ethical concerns in regards to the potential privacy violation? If not, how was the topic handled by employees/management?

If we expect employees speaking up to fix this, we are going to live in constant disappointment. The pro-privacy people live in a very small, but loud, echo chamber. We need to be proactive with developing pro-privacy technologies if we expect something to be done about this.

The majority of the population and the majority of developers seem to not care at all about intimately targeted ads.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#136

Post by djsumdog »

hoppa_liza wrote: post #126
jaimex2 wrote: post #123

I caught my TV doing this and went to war. For the last two years I have had a service running that floods garbage data back to the collection point from several addresses throughout the Internet. You're welcome.

Care to elaborate on this? How you caught it, what and how are you sending back to them?

I'm curious too. Do you have a blog post detailing it?

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#137

Post by djsumdog »

elorant wrote: post #29
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?

Build a blacklist of companies that adopt such policies and boycott the shit out of them.

So....stop buying everything?

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#138

Post by hueving »

jaimex2 wrote: post #123

I caught my TV doing this and went to war. For the last two years I have had a service running that floods garbage data back to the collection point from several addresses throughout the Internet. You're welcome.

Well played. This is the kind of stuff botnets should be put to work doing. :)

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#140

Post by mikeryan »

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…

Nothing I've said is "secret" anyone active in the Smart TV or Interactive TV space knew this was going on and how it worked. When I said intimate I didn't mean secret, I mean I actually used the technology being discussed, and at its very nascent stage.

There were multiple ACR Vendors doing the same thing (Gracenote, Samba TV are two at top of my head, there were many failed vendors in this space)

Google ACR on TVs and you'll find all the info you need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition

https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/04/cognitive-networks-ces/

(BTW the app in that techcrunch article is the one we worked on)

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