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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

#241

Post by kakarot »

deadbunny wrote: post #229
z3t4 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> as the data could be collected by a car driving by, or via your neighborers Wifi. What? How is it going to connect to your neighbours wifi? How is someone driving past going to connect to your TV? Is the TV going to set itself up as an access point? I'm completely behind not connecting random devices in my house to the internet but suggesting they are somehow trying to get data out by connecting to random networks…

Multiple compromised nodes working together to identify you.

We already see this with things like ultrasonic communication. A compromised (has sketchy app installed) phone could, for example, communicate with your television or computer speakers and mic via ultrasonic frequencies to determine what ads you have seen, or what digital streaming content you are consuming.

An app could take it even a step further and use a root exploit and secretly take a short recording every 10 minutes or so to relay to someone who wants to know what song or movie you were consuming.

This isn't just possible, things like this have already been found in the wild.

And you can bet your bottom dollar these snaky companies would keep their mouths shut under a NSL if it meant they could keep tracking you.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/ads_surreptit...

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#243

Post by pdkl95 »

throwanem wrote: post #230
pdkl95 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prevent external network access to all the devices You're assuming that is possible . Some system-on-a-chips have started including an integrated LTE modem. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos#List_of_ARMv8_Exynos_So... )

Who's paying for the data, though?

Same as everything else in a business: the company itself out of the profit made profit made when they sell the data. out of the profit. From the FTC's statement:

> Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others.

(or simply include the cost in the price of the TV)

Also, the data costs should be a lot lower if they negotiate for a very-lows-priority, off-hour plan that batches the data, only uploading when it is cheapest.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#244

Post by pbhjpbhj »

deadbunny wrote: post #229
z3t4 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> as the data could be collected by a car driving by, or via your neighborers Wifi. What? How is it going to connect to your neighbours wifi? How is someone driving past going to connect to your TV? Is the TV going to set itself up as an access point? I'm completely behind not connecting random devices in my house to the internet but suggesting they are somehow trying to get data out by connecting to random networks…

I think the parent is being purposefully hyperbolic ... however, a router manufacturer could have a ghost APs that domestic goods could try to send via. It perhaps wouldn't be the weirdest invasion of consumer privacy story either.

In the UK nearly everywhere send to have a BT WiFi signal as they give out routers with a commercial side-channel that anyone can pay to access. If your smart device had access to BT WiFi they'd get a signal out in many places regardless of whether the TV owner had WiFi.

/EvilGenius

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#245

Post by codedokode »

diamondlovesyou wrote: post #170

What I'm about to say may go against what many of the HN community believes. This isn't an attack on anyone's beliefs; I'm merely expressing my thoughts in an attempt to solicit constructive discourse. I'mma be honest. I don't understand the repulsion at the possibility of corporation X knowing my personal info, (excluding the usual things like bank account info, SSNs, etc) like my location, search history, etc. To b…

The collected data about you will be used by marketers to sell you goods and services at a higher price and not to make a "smarter smartphone". For example if an online shop somehow knows that you live in your own house it can set higher price for you than for people who rent a cheap apartment in a city.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#247

Post by pbhjpbhj »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #99
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…

Quick tip: If you actually care about being downvoted, dont complain about being downvoted. Many people will do so just for mentioning it, it is against the rules, and it's whining about imaginary, non-transferrable internet points

Personally I think it's fine to complain about being downvoted if no-one has responded constructively.

It might not help, of course.

Moreover, without vote visibility you can't tell if the reason given by one person is supported by others.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#248

Post by codedokode »

abandonliberty wrote: post #57
Smerity wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To note, they were also forced to delete the collected data, though the insights they've already extracted / profits from data they've already sold may offset both the point and the $2.2 million fine.

You're right, good insight. I was thinking purely about risk/reward for other players in the market. The fine is 0.4% of the Note 7 recall cost, not including brand damage. A fine this nominal could easily be seen as the cost of doing business - if you get caught.

If they really have sold 10 million devices then the fine is 22 cents per device.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#249

Post by harryh »

thenayr wrote: post #30
ComputerGuru wrote: post #6

A 2.2M settlement is absolute peanuts compared to the mountains of cash they likely made.

Yeah not much of a punishment to discourage further abuse. Should have fined them on a ratio of the number of data points they collected (100 billion). Even a 100:1 seems like a reasonable punishment for this scale of abuse ($1 billion)

The idea that the data that they collected was worth $1B is laughable.

Re: What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

#250

Post by cybergoat »

voltagex_ wrote: post #218
ktta wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I'm running OpenWRT on a TP-Link TL-WR841N/ND v8 and the LuCI interface that comes out of box is vastly better (cleaner and more feature-full) than the majority of consumer router interfaces I've encountered. In particular, the realtime graph of current connections!

You can likely set your ADSL modem into "bridge mode" and put a user-flashable device between that and your network. Once you get NBN you just connect the WAN port to the NBN termination box and you'll be getting DHCP from your ISP.

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