Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

ftc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 340 posts

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#201

Post by chinathrow »

moonfern wrote: post #174
hueving wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Avast, source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13079569 AJ007 Here are the terms, it's in section 8.Privacy, processing of personal information. https://www.avast.com/eula-avast-free-products However "AVAST may publish or share such information with third parties that are not part of the AVAST Group but will only ever do so after removing personally identifiable information."

Also: https://www.pehub.com/2015/05/avast-leads-22-mln-round-for-j...

"Jumpshot also captures https clickstream data to reveal in-depth buying and social behavior above and beyond simple browsing."

Capturing https clickstream data is only possible when you MITM the user - see Avast.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#202

Post by z3t4 »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #167
mikeryan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks and noted. If I ever end up getting a SmartTV (due to dumb TV's no longer being sold), it's never getting on my network and going to be banned at the mac address level.

It needs to be physically disconnected or on a network without Internet connection. The Mac address is the easiest to spoof. If it has any kind of radio like WiFi you need to de-solder it, as the data could be collected by a car driving by, or via your neighborers Wifi.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#203

Post by LordJZ »

neotek wrote: post #195

"Smart" TVs are the worst TVs I've ever used, I really don't understand the appeal whatsoever. They're almost universally clunky and slow with horrific UI / UX choices and painfully high latency on simple things like browsing a list of files or even just registering button presses, provide fuck all useful benefit over and above the regular TV experience, are usually running some long-deprecated version of Android whi…

And then there's Tizen which is even worse than Android Smart TVs. Dad bought a Samsung Smart TV with Tizen (even though I begged him to change his mind and buy a better solution for half the price) and expecting the worst I was _still_ suprised what an absolute piece of garbage that TV is.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#204

Post by forkerenok »

kchoudhu wrote: post #193
ohyes wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inter…

Wait, what's cloudstagram?

That's a very subtle joke :)

(Those in the dark search for cloud2butt browser plugin)

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#205

Post by msmith10101 »

twunde wrote: post #89
msmith10101 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess this is what spurred the investigation: https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-... Still, how did this article come about? What is a whistle blower?

A whistle blower is a term for an insider who leaks a company's criminal practices to the government. They can get a percentage of monies recovered through lawsuits

Sorry, I meant to ask "was it a whistleblower?". Just curious how exactly this whole gnarly situation was discovered.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#206

Post by ktta »

voltagex_ wrote: post #145
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.

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. 1: https://omnia.turris.cz/en/

You don't really need a open source router. Just something that can be flashed with Openwrt or dd-wrt. The router you linked actually runs a fork of Openwrt.

https://openwrt.org/

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#207

Post by alkonaut »

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.

The smart features mostly suck, but the idea of using two remotes (or a nonstandard programmable remote) is pretty unattractive. I jump through a lot of hoops to be able to plug my tv antenna cable into my tv rather than a set top box of some kind, so it would defeat the point to have a set top box for the smart features.

I suppose if the streaming services I use were all compatible with e.g. ChromeCast I could use that, but until they are I'm pretty happy with the ui of the SmartTV. Most importantly, the kids can use Netflix without having their own smartphones.

I'm going to check the settings really carefully on the TV to see if I can at least maximize privzcy, but I wish there was something better such as a firewall setting I could use. Is there a guide for various manufacturers/models floating around somewhere?

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#208

Post by alkonaut »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #103
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 don't understand the consumer infatuation with "smart", Internet connected devices, especially smart homes. Yes auto lighting and hvac systems are cool, but it introduces so many security vulnerabities that it's not worth it. I dont ever see myself using autonomous, internet connected cars. I cant think of a bigger hacking target for terrorists and mischief makers alike.

The "SmartTV" isn't really smart (nor is anything to be honest). The SmartTV is just a smartphone type hardware built into the TV so the kids can Watch netflix and you don't need a second box + remote to do it. I find that pretty compelling actually.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#209

Post by rmc »

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?

> What can an average citizen do (short of living Ron Swanson-style in a cabin in the woods) to protect their privacy?

Talk to your politicians. Tell them that data privacy is important. If you're in the USA lobby for something like the EU's Data Protection law (even at the constitutional level). If you're in EU, lobby for stronger data protection (no more sharing data with the USA)

Post reply on HN