I wonder if Comcast does the same, they can even cache user interests locally waiting for a connection to be available.
What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
211–220 of 340 posts
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#212I 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.
Is it an unsecured or secured connection? Can you make a connection?
You might want to check if they just blocked your IP addresses and your connections are being dropped. Although if you're been running it for 2 years(!), I think you have it covered.
Just a tip: It's very easy to clean up completely garbage data from a database. Any data scientist worth their salt would do that. Getting rid of your garbage data just needs a couple lines of code. What you need to do is, skew the data so that it isn't suspicious but eventually will mess up their inferences.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why not, when you are abroad it is kinda the only way you can watch many of the content that is not available in other countries. Even subtitles are not available in English in some countries like Sweden.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#214If 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…
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…
That's the equivalent of people having to manage blacklists for ad blocking - it doesn't work for most people because it's too much work or too difficult.
Just like uBlock solves it by making an accessible plugin and a manages blacklist, I hope someone will launch a simple appliance for home use that will manage this. The router/firewall UI would just need to provide simple switches for blocking various manufacturers' data collection.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not much technical knowledge required. Basic parental control on my ASUS router denies access to the internet to Samsung TV and it can still play content from LAN via UPnP.
In order to roughly scale how much technical knowledge this actually represents, remember that most humans, even most humans with home networks, do not know what routers and networks are.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#216So 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…
Facebook categorises a video view as anything seen for more than three seconds, so draw your own conclusions from that.
Instagram was purely chronological until mid way through last year. And it only shows you content you've subscribed to. So it's possible an account you were following changed its posting habits.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm amazed you can access Netflix behind a VPN.
Why not, when you are abroad it is kinda the only way you can watch many of the content that is not available in other countries. Even subtitles are not available in English in some countries like Sweden.
Because Netflix blocks VPNs since a few months. It's really hard to find a vpn that works with netflix. Even setting up your own won't work, most ip ranges that are used by data centres are blocked by default.
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Yeah, they're pretty rare in Australia due to our reliance on ADSL - unless you flash with DD-WRT. It's still not something everyone does. OpenWRT and DD-WRT's UIs are pretty rough (although, most commercial UIs are, too)
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
All hardware is removable if you own a soldering iron ;)
Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen
#220Want a dumb TV? Disconnect it from internet and have your Roku etc.