But if not, it’s likely that tracking is still enabled, since Vizio had been turning it on by default. The company tells The Verge that it’s begun sending out pop-ups to get owners’ consent - so you may have already dealt with this. Vizio now has to “prominently disclose and obtain affirmative express consent” before tracking your viewing habits, thanks to a settlement with the FTC. If you own a Vizio TV, you can stop all tracking So companies may know info like your age and income, but they won’t have your specific name. The one thing Vizio didn’t allow, and still prohibits, is for this viewing data to be linked to a specific person. According to the complaint, Vizio got personal.” And let’s be clear: We’re not talking about summary information about national viewing trends. This is something Vizio has been excited about: the data service, branded Inscape, was a key piece of the company’s IPO pitch to investors before the company agreed to sell itself to LeEco last year.Īs Lesley Fair, a senior attorney with the FTC’s consumer protection bureau, puts it in a blog post, “Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others. That includes “sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, home ownership, and household value.” The information is then sold to analytics and ad companies and used to target advertisements to you. That data is then paired with demographic details on you. The company’s TVs are able to track what you watch on a second-by-second basis, whether you’re watching cable, playing a Blu-ray, or streaming a movie, according to the FTC. Vizio has been collecting some fairly personal data. Here’s what you do and don’t need to worry about if you don’t want your TV tracking you. Those devices are very likely still tracking your TV habits in one way or another, and they probably aren’t as clear about it as Vizio now has to be. It was a bad practice that people had been complaining about for years - a possible class action lawsuit was even filed in 2016 - but the situation is now a relatively good one for Vizio TV owners: the company is specifically prohibited from tracking your viewing habits without explicit permission.įor people who own other TVs and streaming boxes, it might still be a different story. Newer Vizio TVs that run the company’s SmartCast system have the tracking turned off by default. The main problem was that Vizio TVs had tracking features turned on by default, instead of an opt-in setting like many other manufacturers use (and, as you’ll see, sometimes hide or trick you into accepting). Vizio got in trouble with the FTC this week and had to pay $2.2 million to settle charges around having monitored the viewing habits on more than 11 million TVs without consent over the course of two years.
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