Of all the points of electronic insecurity one deals with every day, your TV is probably the last you’d expect. Not so, because Vizio has been caught spying on its customers – through approximately 11 million smart TVs in the US and since 2014.
These TVs have automatically tracked consumers’ viewing habits and sent that data back to its servers. Vizio was collecting a selection of pixels on screen that could match a database with movies, series and advertising content. It could also match data from set-top boxes, ISPs, streaming devices, dvd players and OTT broadcasts resulting in as many as 100 bllion data points per day.
It gets worse – Vizio then sold that data to advertisers and others! Because IP addresses were part of this bundle of data, the data aggregators could match the data with individual consumers or households, and track their viewing and online habits. Privacy much?