What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen • Hacker News Board

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#151

Post by voltagex_ » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 2:58 AM UTC

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.

There is a market opportunity for a router with some smarts that can do automatic VLANs and access control. e.g. lightbulbs can talk to *.lifx.com and local Android devices but nothing else, TV can talk to YouTube but not to the fridge, etc etc.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#152

Post by ChoGGi » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:00 AM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #121

Neliquat wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly what you said. Even if I do my very best to secure my router and blacklist the TV's Mac address (and never give it the wifi password), how do I know that my neighbours won't mistakenly let their WiFi open for a day or two until they realize their mistake? Or if I tether my mobile data from my phone and turn into a router, that I might forget to secure it? All it takes is one small slip. I'd rather never take…

You can usually unplug the Wifi module, if you don't mind opening it up (and checking beforehand if it is removable).

Good luck

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#153

Post by mikeryan » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:01 AM UTC

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…

The terms of art are Automatic Content Recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition and Video Fingerprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting

You can dive in from there but it's basically either watermarking or fingerprinting of video and or audio frames. Video was preferred because there were fewer false positives from music beds. In a nutshell its video Shazam

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#154

Post by alirazaq » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:02 AM UTC

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.

Glad to know someone is giving them hell. I purchased a Vizio TV on black friday and suspected that all manufacturers would be doing something like this. For that reason I never configured it to access my wireless network. Scary to realize that it was actually happening and at this scale.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#155

Post by mikeryan » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:05 AM UTC

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.

It's not encoding based - its frame based, basically bitmap data. It has to be to work across the whole video delivery pipeline so it's fairly fuzzy but also accurate.

They need a source to compare too so when we worked on it masters were being sent from the network to the sync technology group. So they had source data for comparison on the first broadcast of a show.

Outside of latency there's no reason they can't match against broadcast content off cable. For user tracking they can just log the fingerprint data and compare it later to source data for analytics so this works fine.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#156

Post by sogen » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:05 AM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #116

AJ007 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

crickets

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#157

Post by remir » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:09 AM UTC

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.

Don't connect your TV to the internet and use something like a Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV, instead.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#158

Post by mikeryan » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:10 AM UTC

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #97

AJ007 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You misunderstand how it works. This worked by fingerprinting audio and video at the TV display level, it's not part of the networking layer. If your content was shown on the TV you could be tracked regardless of source.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#159

Post by chris_wot » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:11 AM UTC

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #97

AJ007 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm amazed you can access Netflix behind a VPN.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#160

Post by chris_wot » Tue, Feb 07, 2017, 3:14 AM UTC

jasonjayr wrote: post #40

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

capturing outgoing pcap data Why wouldn't that data be encrypted? All you would see is packets going to specific IP addresses. No way to analyze the contents. Of course, the data might not be encrypted. Why go thru the effort? Because of the large quantity of data being passed back and forth by almost all Internet connected devices, it's tedious to interpret what's happening even if the flows are completely open.

Speaking of encryption .... If they're capturing the image and sending it back to themselves for classification ... arn't they breaking their HDCP license?

I think they were only sampling areas of the screen.