I have a Vizio TV, can i disable tracking?
What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
141–150 of 340 posts
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#142So 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?
Not really - we talked about it and expected more consumer concerns from other outlets. This work was not being done in secret, when ACR was the hot item it was well known in the industry how it worked. We figured the the vendors would deal with the issues as they were raised - and they did despite some of the potential of the technology for some cool interactive apps the most part it died.
The difference between what we worked on and what Cognitive/Inscape eventually did and got dinged for was that we were using this technology to build sync to broadcast apps not for tracking viewing and usage habits. The work we did never got to large scale deployments and we honestly forgot a bit about it. I knew what Inscape was doing - nothing secret just kind of in the industry weeds - post Vizio sale but honestly didn't think that much about it until now.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#143Ironic that the government should be so concerned about spying.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reputational damage is in some ways will be bigger than the fine itself.
Sad truth is most users don't care and won't ever even hear about this. There might be an impact but it won't really hurt Vizio. ...I hope this is just pessimism. Trust me, I do.
To me, this truth is why the market really isn't a good enough mechanism for protecting consumers - it is downright fatiguing trying to keep track of all of the bad actors/actions and there's no way to be specific in your feedback - market share and revenues are a really imprecise signal.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#145I 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.
I know we can't expect the "average" consumer to do this, but thanks for caring and running tcpdump on your network! It amazes me that with a lot of these stories there's no one popping up with a pcap showing exactly what's going on.
I'm hoping projects like Turris Omnia [1] will allow people to be more in control of what goes in and out of the LAN - my network, my rules.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#146I have a Vizio TV, can i disable tracking?
Nevermind. I found it. Let's hope it does what it says it does.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#147This is ridiculous, I wish someone with money would create an absolute shitstorm by buying this kind of data, buying data from Facebook, google, twitter, internet cable companies, state departments, combining them, deanonymizing millions of users and dumping them. Until something crazy like this happens nothing will happen, it needs to be brought to the light. Until then, no regulation will ever happen on data collection on users and we will all be sheep and the product. Crazy thing, it won't cost that much money. Folks need to wake up and be scared shit less. Everything spies on you, your pace maker, your fitbit, your car, your TV, your fridge, watch. 1984 ain't got shit on this! :-(
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#148I have a Vizio TV, can i disable tracking?
The linked article makes it sound like it was hidden under an obscurely named preference, so you should be able to.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#149"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…
Easier - when I upgrade from my 6+ year old Sony, my TV will either be disconnected (ironically I trust the Xiaomi Mi Box more) or only allowed to access *.youtube.com. I realise this isn't tenable for most consumers.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#150This 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.
Disable UPnP, run a configuration where you can monitor all traffic in and out of your network.