In addition to recording data on what you watch and in what format you watch it in, Vizio also allows their smart TVs to connect to viewers’ home IP addresses. That information is then shared with Vizio’s partners, who in turn could use that data to help to target advertisements. The entire point of Vizio’s advertising push is to sell this information to companies so they can track you on multiple devices.
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A new report has found that Vizio, a California-based TV maker, tracks the viewing habits of a smart TV owner and gives that information to advertisers.
Its privacy policy says that, if the feature is turned off: ‘While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it’.
In an e-mailed response to a Washington Post inquiry, a Vizio spokesperson said the company’s data mining programs are part of a “revolutionary shift across all screens that brings measurability, relevancy and personalization to the consumer like never before”.
Vizio isn’t the first television maker to face scrutiny over the privacy of Smart TV technology. Specifically, Vizio monitors video streams, whether you are watching Netflix or traditional cable. Data broker Experian, for instance, offers a “data enrichment” service that provide “hundreds of attributes” such as age, profession and “wealth indicators” tied to a particular IP address.
Their tracking is opt-out, so unless you know that they hide their tracking mechanism under the “Smart Interactivity” label, you probably wouldn’t have any idea that you could shut it off. There have been plenty of court rulings that say you can’t use an IP address to identify a person, but from an advertising perspective it sure does narrow things down a great deal.
In the US, cable providers and rental services are expressly prohibited from selling information about your viewing habits with other companies.
The one thin silver lining here is that Vizio isn’t the absolute most popular smart TV brand in the market, though it is starting to be more aggressive in its push. The data brokerage firms that handle these relationships, like Experian, Neustar, Tapad, Acxiom, and others are extremely reluctant to discuss their practices or partners, citing secure contracts and private agreements.
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Vizio smart TVs come with a feature that the company dubs as “Smart Interactivity”. Unfortunately, they can’t – what isn’t exposed by bad security practices is broken by malice. Unlike its competitors LG and Samsung, which have similar features, the Vizio version has an opt-out model with the sharing as the default.
