So I have a bit of intimate knowledge of this.<p>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.<p>When developing this we would work directly with Cognitive checking sync'd apps. We knew for a long time that they could see our content in their office while we tested.<p>Note LG got caught on this about 2-3 years ago and made ACR apps opt-in which pretty much killed it for LG.<p>AFAIK Samsung never did the exact same thing a bunch of providers saw the writing on the wall and dumped this sort of technology a few years back. It had some really cool applications for interactive sync to broadcast apps but the privacy concerns killed it for a lot for a lot of manufacturers.
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.<p>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 caught my TV doing this and went to war.<p>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.<p>You're welcome.
The amount of money they made from that data is probably orders of magnitude more than the paltry $2.2 million penalty.<p>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.<p>What can an average citizen do (short of living Ron Swanson-style in a cabin in the woods) to protect their privacy?
<i>Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content.</i><p>I would like to know more about that process. I find it ethically abhorrent, but technically very interesting.<p>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 proportional location on the screen?
If nobody's started one yet, I think there would be an audience for a blog/vlog/whatever that reviews <i>non-smart</i> TVs. And/or a place that evaluates which "smart" TVs function acceptably as "dumb" when they are <i>not</i> connected to a network.<p>Realistically, this would have to include evaluating things <i>beside</i> consumer TVs for use as living room devices, since "smart" features in consumer TVs are nearly unavoidable at this point.<p>Because I'm going to have to start looking into the world of commercial displays for my next TV, I guess. At least I <i>think</i> those don't have "smart" features. Yet?
"Vizio has agreed to stop unauthorized tracking".<p>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.<p>What actual proof do we have that LG actually stopped? What actual proof can we have that Vizio will stop doing this?
Just further confirms that "Smart" TV's are a ripoff at best and a scam at worst.<p>Never, ever, ever buy a television described as smart. For any reason at all. All of the solutions are miserably pathetic. All of the solutions are riddled with bugs, design omissions and potentially nasty security zero days. All implementations have little to no update support from major third parties.<p>And, in many cases from many companies, the units spy on you as aggressively as could be to sell data for marketing purposes.<p>"Smart" tv's are lose lose lose lose. You pay more, you get inferior software, inferior hardware and ultimately have your privacy abused.<p>EDIT: To be fair, I love my Vizio dumb TV I just got. 40" 1080p dumb TV for $167 inc. taxes this past black friday. Got a HDR/4K Roku for an additional $70 and this TV is beautiful and the Roku is so much impossibly better in both hardware, software and third party support than any "smart" solution ever could be, and costs far less than the "smart" upgrade!
"Smart" TVs are the worst TVs I've ever used, I really don't understand the appeal whatsoever.<p>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 which is riddled with security holes that will never get patched - why does anyone actually <i>want</i> this?<p>A Raspberry Pi running OSMC is everything you could ever want out of a home media setup, it'll work with good old regular "dumb" TVs that can't invade your privacy, with an interface so simple your grandparents can use it, and can be put together for well under $50.
This 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.
This is promising and is a good start towards IOT precedent, and perhaps even operating systems of our devices (Windows 10).<p>- Explain your data collection practices up front.<p>- Get consumers’ consent before you collect and share highly
specific information about their entertainment preferences.<p>- Make it easy for consumers to exercise options.<p>- Established consumer protection principles apply to new technology.<p>I wonder how many technical teams are scrambling to undo their spying now - though this is a fairly insubstantial fine. I could see the data being potentially worth more than $2.2m
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.<p>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 be clear, I'm 10000000% against warrantless (FISA court "warrants" excluded) government access to this information. Here's my reasoning:<p>* Governments<p>Have the power to arrest and detain on a whim. Not to mention, use drone strikes.<p>* Corporations<p>... Don't. These entities have self-interested incentives to provide tools which are economically productive for users. For example, a smarter smartphone, whatever that may be.<p>Regarding Vizio, my grip is that Vizio's goal (for this product at least) is to make a profit producing TVs. So, after the TV is sold, the product is individually "finished" (not considering support stuff). So, then, what other product is the data collection for, and what does this product give me in return for my data? The answer to both is no, and not just for Vizio.<p>Maybe I'm naive.
Huge schocker /s<p>Pretty sure that Samsung does very similar things. I've been interested in actually capturing outgoing pcap data for this purpose. Looks like I have a new project to add the pile.
<i>> Consumers have bought more than 11 million internet-connected Vizio televisions since 2010.</i><p><i>> The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey for a total of $2.2 million.</i><p><i>> Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others.</i><p>$2.2 million / 11 million tvs = $0.20 per tv
This is why you do not use a smart TV: Nefarious data collection on what you watch and Samsungs are known to demand to show ads or else. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585132" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585132</a> <a href="https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/241500-samsung-smart-tv-update-forces-users-see-ads" rel="nofollow">https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/241500-samsung-smart...</a> <a href="http://www.techtimes.com/articles/190222/20161227/samsung-smart-tvs-shove-ads-down-users-throats-and-no-theres-no-real-opt-out.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.techtimes.com/articles/190222/20161227/samsung-sm...</a><p>I'm also, for political reasons, suspicious of the FTC's willingness to pursue such cases in the future.
It's amazing this was settled for a few million dollars. It's easy to imagine an alternative press release where the settlement was 10x or even 100x larger.
>On a second-by-second basis, Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. What’s more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs.<p>> The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey for a total of $2.2 million.
So I actually worked at cognitive networks up until the end of 2014. I've read this thread and thought I would address some things here that didn't seem to get fully concrete answers (in no particular order).<p>The ACR technology that cognitive used was/is in vizio and LG tvs. during the time I worked there we only had a deal to use it actively on vizio tvs. I guess lg was just testing the waters to see how it'd work. The ACR technology that CG used is based on RGB values from sampled patches on regions of the image. There was no audio finger printing used. There were a number of items that would mess up the "recognition". Some of those included aspect ratio of content, watermarks from different providers, overlays and basically anything that modified either the size of the original image or obstructed it. For the server infrastructure, what we did was we ingested live feeds from the major network providers, these feeds had to be ahead of what tvs were watching by at least 5-10 seconds so we actually had the fingerprint data in our database to be recognized. we would pair the ingested fingerprints to TV scheduling data and voila, we "knew" what you were watching. Now clearly if we didn't have the content in our database we had no idea what was being shown on your screen.<p>What did we use the ACR data for. Well there were 2 "deals" going on while I was there. One was ratings, something to compete with the likes of neilsons. Different content providers, distributors, marketing agencies, etc. would want ratings info. Additional there were other "data mining" companies that build profiles based off public IP addresses that would want to use our data to enhance and augment their data. The other application that was the one that everybody was after want "interactive advertising". This would allow us to pop up an HTML5 app/page based on the ACR. So for example your selling a car, your ad comes up, you pop up your app and allow the user to schedule a test drive or look at the car in more detail. The use cases were endless though.<p>The ACR technology ONLY worked on content that was viewed from the HDMI ports. Any built in apps like netflix or hulu that were run, ACR was force disabled. One thing I remember about that was that netflix is huge about NOBODY getting viewing data/ratings information about netflix and it's users. Only netflix has that data apparently. One somewhat reassuring thing about disabling the technology is at one point vizio did notice a bug on one of its TVs where ACR was not being disabled when the user opted out of "interactivity". This was a big deal and we were required to solve it ASAP.<p>AMA if I missed something.
1. Press the Menu button or open the HDTV Settings.
2. Select System.
3. Select Reset & Admin.
4. Select Smart Interactivity.
5. Right arrow to Off.
This 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! :-(
I wonder how many of these Vizio TVs are in government offices, recording and selling their IPs, pixels, preferences and schedules.<p>Remember, it's not just broadcast, it's also from DVD players. Anything displayed.<p>And I wonder who's buying, and then correlating IPs and devices, besides the obvious advertisers. The potential for espionage and extortion is interesting.<p>"That's an interesting fetish you got there, Mr third or fourth down on the org chart who does the actual day to day running of the agency. It'd be a shame if it was to be ... exposed."
> Consumers have bought more than 11 million internet-connected Vizio televisions since 2010<p>11 million televisions. 2.2 million penalty. 20 cents per television.
I got a supposedly "smart" TV at a ludicrous price the other day, maybe because there are already surplus units that nobody wants? It's a Roku/Sharp combo thing so there are no numbers on the remote either, but the UI is actually pretty darn good.<p>And no, I would <i>never</i> connect my cheapo TV to the Internet. Come on.
How did Vizio get caught? Was it a whistle blower? <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-watching-you" rel="nofollow">https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-...</a>
>>The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC<p>>>and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey<p><i></i>Read<i></i>:
FTC and New Jersey decided to made money off consumers too by charging Vizio a little tax.
"Protected by law" consumers got: $0.
There is a comment on this article basically saying, "I bought a Vizio TV, later my email, bank account, and facebook got hacked, and now I know why." Shows roughly the understanding of these issues for some people.
The law is not strict enough. No single byte should be sent outside without user's consent. No matter whether it contains personal data or not.<p>And that would make proving company's guilt much easier.
Could we merge this with <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771</a>
Wow, those punishments are pathetic for sampling private movies you watched (e.g. porn) on your TV and funneling that information off with IP address to advertisers.
Consumers want the best service at the cheapest price. Producers want to maximize the profit on products and services. Advertisers want the best return on investment for their ad dollars so they also maximise profit.<p>This are fundamental thruths of the market. It's why Google and Facebook are behemoths.<p>The only way to win the game is precision tracking, addictive services and building good models of customer behavior for advertising.
On a similar note, can anyone here speak to the hidden audio signal that is broadcast over the air with things like sporting events?<p>I noticed it once when Google Now knew instantaneously that I was watching a specific NFL football game and began displaying the score. It felt magical but after a little research there are hidden frequencies that reveal this information.
How are fines that are as little as this supposed to deter future companies from sketchy collection practices? One can only assume they made more than $3.7M selling illegally collected data.<p>There's no incentive for companies to do better and not be shady. It pays to roll the dice and see if you get caught. If you do just say sorry and pay a small fine.
If they were aggregating and selling this information to television networks, as a better way of measuring how many viewers a show had, I would be okay with that. It may help keep some of my favorite shows on air. But to sell my individual viewing habits with my IP address? Not okay.
With Vizio and other Dolby HDR compatible TVs you'll have to keep it connected if they intend to get firmware updates. I wonder which TV will be ideal for purchase, now that Samsung and Vizio have been caught hoodwinking their customers.
I wonder how many meetings were called at other manufacturers when this went public, both to check on what they themselves were doing, and to make plans to stop doing it where relevant.
Yah but Trump's going to get rid of the FTC and regulations that get in the way of business, such as spying on you and selling your watching habits and personal info to a bunch of other companies.
Now that we know what they did the class action lawsuits should follow. If your concerned about privacy don't connect your TV to the Internet. Treat it like the dumb screen it's supposed to be and just cast or route content to it.
this sound like a reverse-DRM, they can they figure out if you're watching pirated content then send you a bill.<p>this cheap unknown brand doesn't look so cheap now does it.