Vizio secretly collected 100 billion viewing data points daily from 11 million smart TVs.
Evidence
In 2017 the FTC reached a $2.2 million settlement of a complaint initiated by the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General against Vizio, one of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors of internet-enabled smart televisions. Vizio’s supply operations appear to be even more aggressive than Samsung’s. Investigators discovered that “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.” The company then identified additional viewing data “from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts.” All of this amounted to as much as 100 billion data points each day just from the 11 million TVs identified in the settlement. Vizio disguised its supply operations behind a setting called “Smart Interactivity,” described to consumers as a feature that “enables program offers and suggestions” without any indication of its actual functions. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 824
Categorization
- SHARE: The 100-billion-data-points-a-day figure for a TV manufacturer is the kind of concrete, startling metric a specific person tracking surveillance economics would appreciate.
- CANDY: A single startling stat — a TV brand quietly tracked 100 billion pixels a day — is light conversational material on its own.
- SEED: The ‘Smart Interactivity’ euphemism — a feature name that hides surveillance functions — is a strong example for any essay on how product names launder invasive data practices.
- XREF: connects to: Connected TVs transmit household conversation to third parties under opaque privacy policies. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 822
Broader Connections
- Connected TVs transmit household conversation to third parties under opaque privacy policies.
#exemplifies(0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 822