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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday November 10 2015, @11:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the watching-big-brother-watching-you dept.

Have a Vizio smart TV? You'll probably want to read this article over at net-security.org then:

Owners of Smart TVs manufactured by California-based consumer electronics company Vizio should be aware that their viewing habits are being tracked and that information sold to third parties ("partners").

And, what's more, with a recent change of the company's privacy policy, the company has started providing this data to companies that "may combine this information with other information about devices associated with that IP address."

"Beginning October 31, 2015, VIZIO will use Viewing Data together with your IP address and other Non-Personal Information in order to inform third party selection and delivery of targeted and re-targeted advertisements. These advertisements may be delivered to smartphones, tablets, PCs or other internet-connected devices that share an IP address or other identifier with your Smart TV," the privacy policy says.

Vizio's competitors Samsung and LG Electronics can also track users' viewing habits via their smart TV offerings, ProPublica's Julia Angwin pointed out, but the feature has to be explicitly turned on by the users.

Yep, glad I do all my TV watching on a computer monitor.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @12:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @12:42AM (#261510)

    > Wait, they can embed tracking into mp4s now? Damn you, kat.cr!

    Ever use one of those apps to identify a song [google.com] just by letting it listen to a little bit of while its playing?

    That tech can be embedded in the audio path of TVs, receivers, etc. If anything in the output chain is online it is a point where media recognition software can figure out what you are watching and listening too. Never mind all the other stuff in the room with a microphone or camera that might be listening in too.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday November 12 2015, @09:13PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday November 12 2015, @09:13PM (#262365) Journal

    ...or any other running process can probably figure it out just from `ps -ef`
    ...or sniffing network traffic when your media player goes to look up media information online