20 ms·

What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen

888 points by Deinos 10y ago

jeanvaljean2463 10y ago
Huge schocker /s Pretty sure that Samsung does very similar things. I've been interested in actually capturing outgoing pcap data for this purpose. Looks like I have a new project to add the pile.
- modoc 10y ago
  Why do you think Samsung is doing this as well?
  - jeanvaljean2463 10y ago
    http://www.myce.com/news/users-fix-samsung-smart-tv-time-two-workarounds-known-75148/ http://www.myce.com/news/users-fix-samsung-smart-tv-time-two... ( See comments about said Samsung TVs ) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771
    - modoc 10y ago
      I see DNS issues with SmartHub, etc.. but I don't see anyone suggesting that Samsung is capturing image data and sending it back? Not saying they aren't, but as an owner of two Samsung TVs, I'd be interested in any real evidence of them doing this type of thing..
      - jeanvaljean2463 10y ago
        Fair enough, probably my own paranoia at play. Replace "pretty sure" with "highly suspicious of the probability".
      - caconym_ 10y ago
        This happened a while ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/19/samsung-smart-tvs-send-unencrypted-voice-recognition-data-across-internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/19/samsung-s...
        yincrash 10y ago
        However, as far as anyone has shown, that audio data is only when the user uses the voice functionality on the TV. They just were bad about encryption, but to use voice search, it made sense that they were sent data. That is remarkably different than recording image data every second from every television and sending that back.
        caconym_ 10y ago
        Not saying it's the same, just saying it's a potentially questionable (re privacy) thing Samsung has already been caught doing. Not sure if they were selling any of those data, anonymized or not, either. edit: It's also worth pointing out that while technical people (e.g. us) may see voice recognition tech and immediately suspect that it involves phoning home, most people probably have no idea that anything of what they say is leaving their living room.
  - nanidin 10y ago
    It's in the privacy/TOS section on the Samsung TV I bought from Costco 3 months ago. "Interest Based Advertisement. Samsung provides the ability to obtain and view interactive and interest based advertising on your Smart TV. Interest based advertisements will rely on your TV viewing history and Smart TV usage information. Your viewing history includes information about the networks, channels, and programs viewed on your Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information." It is opt-out, and it's buried a couple levels deep in the menus.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  capturing outgoing pcap data Why wouldn't that data be encrypted? All you would see is packets going to specific IP addresses. No way to analyze the contents. Of course, the data might not be encrypted. Why go thru the effort? Because of the large quantity of data being passed back and forth by almost all Internet connected devices, it's tedious to interpret what's happening even if the flows are completely open.
  - 1_2__3 10y ago
    Experience would suggest the chances of the data being encrypted are very low.
  - manarth 10y ago
    Why wouldn't that data be encrypted? Because manufacturers are rubbish? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/samsung_smart_tv_privacy_rewind/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/samsung_smart_tv_pri...
  - computator 10y ago
    > The data might not be encrypted. Why go thru the effort? It's true that a lot of IoT devices communications are not encrypted. But what concerns me is that they'll start encrypting everything so that we can't analyze what's being transmitted. Not for our privacy but to prevent us from knowing what they're doing.
  - jasonjayr 10y ago
    Speaking of encryption .... If they're capturing the image and sending it back to themselves for classification ... arn't they breaking their HDCP license?
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      I think they were only sampling areas of the screen.
- ipsin 10y ago
  One thing that I'd treat as a "tell" for how invasive Samsung's tracking is: how hard is it to disable the Smart TV functionality? For example, can you disable the wireless interface, or will it keep asking you to connect it to the internet? Does the TV itself ask you to agree to a EULA? I've been interested in the Samsung hardware, but only as a Dumb TV. This kind of data collection is not what I'd want.
csours 10y ago
>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. What’s more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs. > The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey for a total of $2.2 million.
nikanj 10y ago
Could we merge this with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771
troydavis 10y ago
It's amazing this was settled for a few million dollars. It's easy to imagine an alternative press release where the settlement was 10x or even 100x larger.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  but then Vizio wouldn't make a profit. The FTC has to make sure these companies continue to be profitable while itself appears to be semi-competent. Similarly, Verizons supercookie "crackdown" was laughable. FTC stands for Fuck the Consumer because that is their primary objective. edit: I phrased the above incorrectly. I meant to imply that the FTC is beholden to these companies and largely does their bidding. Except in narrow circumstances, the FTC really is a tool of the major corporations it is supposed to regulate. Fuck the FTC.
  - teach 10y ago
    I suspect if you rewrote this comment without using such emotionally-charged and loaded language you might have gotten more upvotes. Let me give it a try. "Unfortunately, the FTC has an interest in keeping companies profitable, so any punitive measures take a back seat."
    - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
      without using such emotionally-charged and loaded language Except that "Fuck the Consumer" seems like a nice clear description of the situation.
    - tps5 10y ago
      Sometimes "fuck" isn't emotionally charged. Sometimes it's just the more accurate term.
- acdha 10y ago
  Call (not email, not Twitter) your Congressional representatives and remind them. Agencies act within laws which make certain things easier or harder and they're probably going to settle if the alternative is a lot more work.
ComputerGuru 10y ago
A 2.2M settlement is absolute peanuts compared to the mountains of cash they likely made.
- thenayr 10y ago
  Yeah not much of a punishment to discourage further abuse. Should have fined them on a ratio of the number of data points they collected (100 billion). Even a 100:1 seems like a reasonable punishment for this scale of abuse ($1 billion)
  - KSS42 10y ago
    There probably will be a class action lawsuit.
    - billh 10y ago
      Which will be settled with a coupon for $12.00 off the purchase of your next Vizio Smart TV.
  - harryh 10y ago
    The idea that the data that they collected was worth $1B is laughable.
    - kilotaras 10y ago
      Fine should be bigger than price of the data. Expected return from 'illegal' activity E = R - p * F, where R is revenue, F is fine and p is probability of getting caught. p < 1, so if F < R engaging in such activity is a rational, if immoral, choice.
- Saad_M 10y ago
  The reputational damage is in some ways will be bigger than the fine itself.
  - 10y ago
werber 10y ago
Are they shielded from a class action suit now?
abandonliberty 10y ago
This is promising and is a good start towards IOT precedent, and perhaps even operating systems of our devices (Windows 10). - Explain your data collection practices up front. - Get consumers’ consent before you collect and share highly specific information about their entertainment preferences. - Make it easy for consumers to exercise options. - Established consumer protection principles apply to new technology. I wonder how many technical teams are scrambling to undo their spying now - though this is a fairly insubstantial fine. I could see the data being potentially worth more than $2.2m
- Smerity 10y ago
  To note, they were also forced to delete the collected data, though the insights they've already extracted / profits from data they've already sold may offset both the point and the $2.2 million fine.
  - abandonliberty 10y ago
    You're right, good insight. I was thinking purely about risk/reward for other players in the market. The fine is 0.4% of the Note 7 recall cost, not including brand damage. A fine this nominal could easily be seen as the cost of doing business - if you get caught.
    - codedokode 10y ago
      If they really have sold 10 million devices then the fine is 22 cents per device.
  - cwilkes 10y ago
    Vizio might be able to delete the data but there is not much of a chance that the data brokers they sold to can. Probably already baked into their models. Plus how is this verifiable? The fine should be a lot higher to discourage this action.
- joering2 10y ago
  > I wonder how many technical teams are scrambling to undo their spying now I bet the one that truly have to worry in terms of size calculated that the cost of undoing it will overweight the cost of eventual penalty, underscoring word "eventual".
passivepinetree 10y ago
The amount of money they made from that data is probably orders of magnitude more than the paltry $2.2 million penalty. I hate to get all paranoid, but it seems like every day there's news of a company's data being hacked, and what information isn't being hacked is being actively sold. What can an average citizen do (short of living Ron Swanson-style in a cabin in the woods) to protect their privacy?
- Narkov 10y ago
  "orders of magnitude more" ? As in, ~$200m? No chance. With a little bit of industry knowledge, I would posit that they made roughly the same quantum as the fine.
  - passivepinetree 10y ago
    Can you elaborate on your industry knowledge? I'm not in the industry so I'm curious. I would guess that Vizio would have been able to demand a premium for that data.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 10y ago
    So basically, it pays to engage in unethical behavior, because if you do get caught, the fine will usually not be more than the profit you made from said behavior.
    - bredren 10y ago
      Obviously. Whatsapp broke privacy law in Canada and across Europe to hack growth. Different industry, but Four Loko also was penalized for its risky (but great for some people) original formula.
  - mbesto 10y ago
    > Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. That type of technology alone would cost you at least $2M to build. So either your statement is incorrect or Vizio got a terrible ROI on this (sans fine).
jasonwilk 10y ago
It's not worth buying any of these 'Smart' TVs. I don't know whether it is a shoddy developer experience provided by the likes of Samsung / Vizeo etc or if it's the developers themselves (Hulu I'm looking at you) who do not maintain their apps which are constantly bug filled. I much prefer my old dumb TV that has a Roku plugged into it. Oh yeah, and I know it's not WATCHING ME.
- wrsh07 10y ago
  If you want a high end tv you don't have much choice. But also, why do you not expect your Roku / apple tv / etc to be watching you?
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    > If you want a high end tv you don't have much choice. Don't connect it to the Internet? Barring the manufacturer sneaking a backup cellular modem in there, seems like it's an easy fix.
    - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
      They can nag you about retrieving updates.
      - Relys 10y ago
        root it then! Any kid that knows how to point the libstagefright and DirtyCOW MetaSploit modules at the browser can root their "smart" TV...
        khedoros1 10y ago
        Better option: Buy a different TV that requires less effort to make acceptable, unless there's a huge price incentive to buy the more troublesome TV and "fix" it.
        Clubber 10y ago
bitmapbrother 10y ago
Now that we know what they did the class action lawsuits should follow. If your concerned about privacy don't connect your TV to the Internet. Treat it like the dumb screen it's supposed to be and just cast or route content to it.
kevin_b_er 10y ago
This is why you do not use a smart TV: Nefarious data collection on what you watch and Samsungs are known to demand to show ads or else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585132 https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/241500-samsung-smart-tv-update-forces-users-see-ads https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/241500-samsung-smart... http://www.techtimes.com/articles/190222/20161227/samsung-smart-tvs-shove-ads-down-users-throats-and-no-theres-no-real-opt-out.htm http://www.techtimes.com/articles/190222/20161227/samsung-sm... I'm also, for political reasons, suspicious of the FTC's willingness to pursue such cases in the future.
- xanderstrike 10y ago
  Can you recommend a 50" 1080p tv that isn't "smart"? I've been shopping for a new one and I strongly suspect they don't exist.
  - kelnos 10y ago
    Do they work okay (sans "smart" features) if you just decline to connect them to a network?
  - bcook 10y ago
    Search for Commercial TVs. I saw someone mention this in another thread on here.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Last time around, I elected to buy a smaller "dumb" TV, and just sit closer to it. I learned my lesson very early, with LG as my teacher. If I really had to get a large display, I'd just make it a big computer monitor and add a separate sound setup, or I'd spend the gratuitous extra markup on a commercial "digital signage" display. Either way, I'd probably have to route all TV-related functions through a set-top box with HDMI output, like a DVR, cable/satellite box, or HTPC.
tps5 10y ago
> Consumers have bought more than 11 million internet-connected Vizio televisions since 2010 11 million televisions. 2.2 million penalty. 20 cents per television.
mathgeek 10y ago
I wonder how many meetings were called at other manufacturers when this went public, both to check on what they themselves were doing, and to make plans to stop doing it where relevant.
gesman 10y ago
>>The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC >>and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey Read: FTC and New Jersey decided to made money off consumers too by charging Vizio a little tax. "Protected by law" consumers got: $0.
mikeryan 10y ago
So I have a bit of intimate knowledge of this. Not sure what I can answer but for years my company worked on an Automatic Content Recognition project using tools from a team called Cognitive Networks who were bought by Vizio and makes up the tech that did this. If I understand correctly the founder of Vizio kept this tech for himself in the sale of Vizio. When developing this we would work directly with Cognitive checking sync'd apps. We knew for a long time that they could see our content in their office while we tested. Note LG got caught on this about 2-3 years ago and made ACR apps opt-in which pretty much killed it for LG. AFAIK Samsung never did the exact same thing a bunch of providers saw the writing on the wall and dumped this sort of technology a few years back. It had some really cool applications for interactive sync to broadcast apps but the privacy concerns killed it for a lot for a lot of manufacturers.
- AJ007 10y ago
  Thanks for posting this. When I saw the original FTC story I recalled reading about this once or twice in the past but couldn't think of any key phrases or sources. In response to some of the other comments here, basically what they are guilty of isn't spying but failing to properly disclose and opt-in users. There is a particular major AV vendor who is selling raw clickstream data of millions of their user's internet usage directly to marketers and other parties right now. As far as I can tell, as long as it is buried somewhere in the terms and conditions no one cares. Of course, other companies that are actually serving the content are doing far more than just passively monitoring your viewing habits. From my best guess, Facebook is logging every signal it can from content/pictures/videos it displays to users. Even if you didn't click like, comment, or click through the link it knows the story captured your attention. I had an interesting case with Instagram where after viewing enough pictures of women's butts it started also showing men's bare butts in my feed too.. at least until I never opened any of them, and they disappeared. Users should consider that content providers are going to have extremely deep data sets of even the most minute dimensions of their political leanings, porn viewing habits, dating preferences, and gullibilities. All of this will make what TV shows you watched between Netflix and NBC beyond mundane. With an open web, where we get content from the source, this shouldn't actually be possible. Thank the platform business model.
JohnBooty 10y ago
If nobody's started one yet, I think there would be an audience for a blog/vlog/whatever that reviews non-smart TVs. And/or a place that evaluates which "smart" TVs function acceptably as "dumb" when they are not connected to a network. Realistically, this would have to include evaluating things beside consumer TVs for use as living room devices, since "smart" features in consumer TVs are nearly unavoidable at this point. Because I'm going to have to start looking into the world of commercial displays for my next TV, I guess. At least I think those don't have "smart" features. Yet?
- tracker1 10y ago
  Personally, I'd be pretty happy with very high quality monitor-only sets... I mostly run everything through my AVR anyways. Though some of the smart tv options are getting compelling, I tend to find the integrated devices are always a letdown after a couple years.
  - kelnos 10y ago
    Yeah, same: I expect a TV to last a decade or more, but I expect a smart TV features to become out of date about as quickly as most smartphones do. And I never expect drastic updates for those sorts of things; the TV company's revenue stream depends on you buying a new TV more frequently than I'd plan to. I think a separate device like a ChromeCast or Apple TV is a much better choice.
- swsieber 10y ago
  I'd also like non-smart Blu-ray players. Well, speaking over HDMI is okay, but no internet crap.
  - dzdt 10y ago
    Internet crap is a required part of the Blu-ray standard.
- ams6110 10y ago
  I think it's not just TVs. Any internet-connected home devices have to be viewed with suspicion until proven to be good household citizens.
fencepost 10y ago
This sounds like an excellent reason to simply never connect the TV to the Internet and to simply connect your own system to the TV whether it be a stick PC or something with a little more oompf.
- pdimitar 10y ago
  That's what I plan to do but it still makes me nervous that the "smart" part of the TV might secretly contact my router and ask for network access. I have zero proof but I became paranoid recently. :( The reasonable tradeoff would be to buy a high-quality "dumb" TV with a very good screen. At least I hope so.
  - tucif 10y ago
    > Ask for network access Assuming you have a decent router that supports wpa2 I find it difficult to believe a TV would crack it.
    - Neliquat 10y ago
      Agreed, but. Most just bug you about 'updates' ad nausem until you have a moment of weakness and punch it in. At least some will autoconnect to open wifi. Sure YOURS is locked down, but what about your neighbors? Just 'turning it "off"' is not enough for even casual security.
      - pdimitar 10y ago
        Exactly what you said. Even if I do my very best to secure my router and blacklist the TV's Mac address (and never give it the wifi password), how do I know that my neighbours won't mistakenly let their WiFi open for a day or two until they realize their mistake? Or if I tether my mobile data from my phone and turn into a router, that I might forget to secure it? All it takes is one small slip. I'd rather never take the risk. I'll just look for a dumb huge TV; I need 65+ inches, good luck to me, right?
        10y ago
guscost 10y ago
I got a supposedly "smart" TV at a ludicrous price the other day, maybe because there are already surplus units that nobody wants? It's a Roku/Sharp combo thing so there are no numbers on the remote either, but the UI is actually pretty darn good. And no, I would never connect my cheapo TV to the Internet. Come on.
msmith10101 10y ago
How did Vizio get caught? Was it a whistle blower? https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-watching-you https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-...
pdimitar 10y ago
"Vizio has agreed to stop unauthorized tracking". As if there's any human-measurable way of confirming this. Yes they can be forced by a court. And no, the court can't know if they stopped all of the software copies on all TVs and no, the court can't know if they didn't re-activate them in the future back again. What actual proof do we have that LG actually stopped? What actual proof can we have that Vizio will stop doing this?
- abraae 10y ago
  Vizio is not an individual, it's a collection of employees and contractors, some loyal, and others who hate their corporate overlord and would love nothing better that to dob them in if they ever sneakily resumed the spying.
  - pdimitar 10y ago
    It's pretty sad that this is our only hope for an OEM that doesn't spy on its users, isn't it?
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Where were these noble folks earlier?
    - nxc18 10y ago
      This wasn't an issue earlier. It was a known public fact. I stumbled upon the marketing page for this feature about a year ago by accident without even attempting to find it. What Visio is doing has so little impact on privacy that it is embarrassing for our regulatory system that this is what they took action on.
- digikata 10y ago
  Well, one could monitor all outgoing packets from your smart TV, but you would also need to know exactly how to decode what was contained those packets... unless of course they conveniently set the evil bit for you. With the poor level of development associated with this type of work, it would probably be enough to identify a different set servers for receiving the data. With more sophisticated coding, you really do have to know what's in every outgoing packet. Perhaps it reduces down to problems similar to the discovery path of the VW Diesel emissions cheat - taking an interested hacker/researcher to examine the compliance.
calvinbhai 10y ago
With Vizio and other Dolby HDR compatible TVs you'll have to keep it connected if they intend to get firmware updates. I wonder which TV will be ideal for purchase, now that Samsung and Vizio have been caught hoodwinking their customers.
- kofejnik 10y ago
  why do you want firmware updates? they will only bring more tracking
  - givinguflac 10y ago
    Fixes and improvements.
    - LeoPanthera 10y ago
      Remember when products worked out of the box?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        This. I'm conflicted about updates. On the one hand, people screaming "but security!!111~1" have some pretty good points - especially when talking about internet-connected devices. On the other hand, shit used to work out of the box in the past, and most updates that are not security patches seem to only introduce useless crap and bloat software more.
  - calvinbhai 10y ago
    only reason, with Vizio, is if you buy a 4k HDR TV thats Dolby HDR compatible and a year or two later HDR 10 becomes the standard and Dolby HDR dies, then Vizio 'can' update the TV to be compatible with HDR 10. Otherwise, its safe I guess to keep it disconnected.
awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. I would like to know more about that process. I find it ethically abhorrent, but technically very interesting. Like, is it grabbing, say, three pixels in constant locations across the screen and matching their color change over time? Is it examining a whole block? Is it averaging a block at some proportional location on the screen?
- cracell 10y ago
  I'm also curious if they'd be able to match different encodings of the same video or would only be able to match against specific encodings in their collection.
  - nikmobi 10y ago
    I would imagine it's simply a temporal comparison of pixel colors at predetermined locations, similar to how the Shazam algorithm[1] works? You'd just need to analyze enough pixels to reduce "collisions", coupled with the temporal aspect! [1] https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
  - mikeryan 10y ago
    It's not encoding based - its frame based, basically bitmap data. It has to be to work across the whole video delivery pipeline so it's fairly fuzzy but also accurate. They need a source to compare too so when we worked on it masters were being sent from the network to the sync technology group. So they had source data for comparison on the first broadcast of a show. Outside of latency there's no reason they can't match against broadcast content off cable. For user tracking they can just log the fingerprint data and compare it later to source data for analytics so this works fine.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  The terms of art are Automatic Content Recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition and Video Fingerprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting You can dive in from there but it's basically either watermarking or fingerprinting of video and or audio frames. Video was preferred because there were fewer false positives from music beds. In a nutshell its video Shazam
myrandomcomment 10y ago
So there was a setting to turn their tracking off if you dug into the menus. I turned it off on my set. I hope it covered that feature.
- ben174 10y ago
  It's called Smart Interactivity and it's so far tucked away it's blatantly obvious they intended to hide it. As I recall it was in the 'System Reset' menu for some inexplicable reason.
whalesalad 10y ago
On a similar note, can anyone here speak to the hidden audio signal that is broadcast over the air with things like sporting events? I noticed it once when Google Now knew instantaneously that I was watching a specific NFL football game and began displaying the score. It felt magical but after a little research there are hidden frequencies that reveal this information.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jaimex2 10y ago
I caught my TV doing this and went to war. For the last two years I have had a service running that floods garbage data back to the collection point from several addresses throughout the Internet. You're welcome.
- hoppa_liza 10y ago
  Care to elaborate on this? How you caught it, what and how are you sending back to them?
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    I'm curious too. Do you have a blog post detailing it?
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      Can't speak for OP, but my solution involved the words pfSense, tcpdump, bro, and squid.
- hueving 10y ago
  Well played. This is the kind of stuff botnets should be put to work doing. :)
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  I know we can't expect the "average" consumer to do this, but thanks for caring and running tcpdump on your network! It amazes me that with a lot of these stories there's no one popping up with a pcap showing exactly what's going on. I'm hoping projects like Turris Omnia [1] will allow people to be more in control of what goes in and out of the LAN - my network, my rules. 1: https://omnia.turris.cz/en/ https://omnia.turris.cz/en/
  - ktta 10y ago
    You don't really need a open source router. Just something that can be flashed with Openwrt or dd-wrt. The router you linked actually runs a fork of Openwrt. https://openwrt.org/ https://openwrt.org/
hueving 10y ago
Wow, those punishments are pathetic for sampling private movies you watched (e.g. porn) on your TV and funneling that information off with IP address to advertisers.
silveira 10y ago
> Consumers have bought more than 11 million internet-connected Vizio televisions since 2010. > The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey for a total of $2.2 million. > Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others. $2.2 million / 11 million tvs = $0.20 per tv
- jaclaz 10y ago
  To be picky, the thingy was introduced "only" in 2014, so maybe "only" 4.5 million tv affected, that would raise the cost for the company to a whopping $0.50/each, more than double what you calculated but still peanuts ...
firefoxd 10y ago
I have a Vizio TV, can i disable tracking?
- firefoxd 10y ago
  Nevermind. I found it. Let's hope it does what it says it does. http://i.imgur.com/aXThhIg.jpg http://i.imgur.com/aXThhIg.jpg
- incongruity 10y ago
  The linked article makes it sound like it was hidden under an obscurely named preference, so you should be able to.
hoodoof 10y ago
Ironic that the government should be so concerned about spying.
segmondy 10y ago
This is ridiculous, I wish someone with money would create an absolute shitstorm by buying this kind of data, buying data from Facebook, google, twitter, internet cable companies, state departments, combining them, deanonymizing millions of users and dumping them. Until something crazy like this happens nothing will happen, it needs to be brought to the light. Until then, no regulation will ever happen on data collection on users and we will all be sheep and the product. Crazy thing, it won't cost that much money. Folks need to wake up and be scared shit less. Everything spies on you, your pace maker, your fitbit, your car, your TV, your fridge, watch. 1984 ain't got shit on this! :-(
agotterer 10y ago
How are fines that are as little as this supposed to deter future companies from sketchy collection practices? One can only assume they made more than $3.7M selling illegally collected data. There's no incentive for companies to do better and not be shady. It pays to roll the dice and see if you get caught. If you do just say sorry and pay a small fine.
- jps359 10y ago
  It seems a bit odd... spying on people on a massive scale, nobody goes to jail and only a $2M fine
scarface74 10y ago
If they were aggregating and selling this information to television networks, as a better way of measuring how many viewers a show had, I would be okay with that. It may help keep some of my favorite shows on air. But to sell my individual viewing habits with my IP address? Not okay.
diamondlovesyou 10y ago
What I'm about to say may go against what many of the HN community believes. This isn't an attack on anyone's beliefs; I'm merely expressing my thoughts in an attempt to solicit constructive discourse. I'mma be honest. I don't understand the repulsion at the possibility of corporation X knowing my personal info, (excluding the usual things like bank account info, SSNs, etc) like my location, search history, etc. To be clear, I'm 10000000% against warrantless (FISA court "warrants" excluded) government access to this information. Here's my reasoning: * Governments Have the power to arrest and detain on a whim. Not to mention, use drone strikes. * Corporations ... Don't. These entities have self-interested incentives to provide tools which are economically productive for users. For example, a smarter smartphone, whatever that may be. Regarding Vizio, my grip is that Vizio's goal (for this product at least) is to make a profit producing TVs. So, after the TV is sold, the product is individually "finished" (not considering support stuff). So, then, what other product is the data collection for, and what does this product give me in return for my data? The answer to both is no, and not just for Vizio. Maybe I'm naive.
- DavidSJ 10y ago
  What do you think the corporation does with your personal info when the government asks for it?
- mindviews 10y ago
  It's the lack of transparency that's the real problem. I like to know as much as I can when something I own is sharing personally identifiable data about me and my habits to companies (and governments). The fact that the whole effort on Vizio's part was under the radar means that consumers lacked important information about the functioning of their TV's. If they had known about the depth and breadth of the data collection, maybe some portion of purchasers would have made other decisions. Once that's on the table, then you're free to make the choice to let that data be shared if you're comfortable with it (as you indicate you'd be in your case).
  - irontoby 10y ago
    Yes, yes, yes. For example I am perfectly okay with Google slurping up every bit of data they can about me, tracking my every move etc. because the benefit I receive (i.e. really spooky-accurate suggestions & info in Google Now) is worth the privacy tradeoff. Also, based on their past actions and statements, my level of trust with them is very high that they will be transparent with their uses of that data and that they will diligently guard against that data being put to other uses that they or I didn't allow. But what Vizio has done here makes it perfectly clear that providing any benefit to the end users was never their goal and that keeping the true nature of this program secret was an intentional act. That's enough to ensure I'll never buy a Vizio product in the future.
knodi 10y ago
3.7mill is not enough of a fine. The fine should have been 50mill plus.
- brangalina4eva 10y ago
  plus jail time
- jaclaz 10y ago
  ... and it's not even 3.7 millon, the total is seemingly 2.2 million including the 1.5 million FTC: >The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey for a total of $2.2 million. Or am I reading it wrongly?
sitkack 10y ago
How is this not an illegal wiretap? Shouldn't executives and employees at all the involved companies go to jail?
- an_account 10y ago
  Because wiretaps are for telephones...
nojvek 10y ago
Consumers want the best service at the cheapest price. Producers want to maximize the profit on products and services. Advertisers want the best return on investment for their ad dollars so they also maximise profit. This are fundamental thruths of the market. It's why Google and Facebook are behemoths. The only way to win the game is precision tracking, addictive services and building good models of customer behavior for advertising.
rasz_pl 10y ago
Do you watch cable? Every single settopbox is designed in a way that makes tracking viewing habits trivial and every cable company does this.
neotek 10y ago
"Smart" TVs are the worst TVs I've ever used, I really don't understand the appeal whatsoever. They're almost universally clunky and slow with horrific UI / UX choices and painfully high latency on simple things like browsing a list of files or even just registering button presses, provide fuck all useful benefit over and above the regular TV experience, are usually running some long-deprecated version of Android which is riddled with security holes that will never get patched - why does anyone actually want this? A Raspberry Pi running OSMC is everything you could ever want out of a home media setup, it'll work with good old regular "dumb" TVs that can't invade your privacy, with an interface so simple your grandparents can use it, and can be put together for well under $50.
- LordJZ 10y ago
  And then there's Tizen which is even worse than Android Smart TVs. Dad bought a Samsung Smart TV with Tizen (even though I begged him to change his mind and buy a better solution for half the price) and expecting the worst I was _still_ suprised what an absolute piece of garbage that TV is.
noonespecial 10y ago
Well, looks like old Orwell got the Telescreen just about right. "Facecrime" turned out to be something a little different though...
myrandomcomment 10y ago
1. Press the Menu button or open the HDTV Settings. 2. Select System. 3. Select Reset & Admin. 4. Select Smart Interactivity. 5. Right arrow to Off.
dewiz 10y ago
I wonder if Comcast does the same, they can even cache user interests locally waiting for a connection to be available.
amq 10y ago
Want a dumb TV? Disconnect it from internet and have your Roku etc.
skc 10y ago
The cynic in me believes that Vizio are probably just a few years too early.
chinathrow 10y ago
I wonder how you can work on such a setup as an engineer with morale, colleting 100B data points _daily_ without telling your customers...
kelvin0 10y ago
Vizio: Clash of the Titans, when capitalism is at odds with individual privacy
codedokode 10y ago
The law is not strict enough. No single byte should be sent outside without user's consent. No matter whether it contains personal data or not. And that would make proving company's guilt much easier.
jlebrech 10y ago
this sound like a reverse-DRM, they can they figure out if you're watching pirated content then send you a bill. this cheap unknown brand doesn't look so cheap now does it.
usgroup 10y ago
May be worth noting that AV companies and privacy guards also sometimes operate on this model. E.g Avast and Ghostery.
a3n 10y ago
I wonder how many of these Vizio TVs are in government offices, recording and selling their IPs, pixels, preferences and schedules. Remember, it's not just broadcast, it's also from DVD players. Anything displayed. And I wonder who's buying, and then correlating IPs and devices, besides the obvious advertisers. The potential for espionage and extortion is interesting. "That's an interesting fetish you got there, Mr third or fourth down on the org chart who does the actual day to day running of the agency. It'd be a shame if it was to be ... exposed."
daveheq 10y ago
Yah but Trump's going to get rid of the FTC and regulations that get in the way of business, such as spying on you and selling your watching habits and personal info to a bunch of other companies.
zeropoint46 10y ago
So I actually worked at cognitive networks up until the end of 2014. I've read this thread and thought I would address some things here that didn't seem to get fully concrete answers (in no particular order). The ACR technology that cognitive used was/is in vizio and LG tvs. during the time I worked there we only had a deal to use it actively on vizio tvs. I guess lg was just testing the waters to see how it'd work. The ACR technology that CG used is based on RGB values from sampled patches on regions of the image. There was no audio finger printing used. There were a number of items that would mess up the "recognition". Some of those included aspect ratio of content, watermarks from different providers, overlays and basically anything that modified either the size of the original image or obstructed it. For the server infrastructure, what we did was we ingested live feeds from the major network providers, these feeds had to be ahead of what tvs were watching by at least 5-10 seconds so we actually had the fingerprint data in our database to be recognized. we would pair the ingested fingerprints to TV scheduling data and voila, we "knew" what you were watching. Now clearly if we didn't have the content in our database we had no idea what was being shown on your screen. What did we use the ACR data for. Well there were 2 "deals" going on while I was there. One was ratings, something to compete with the likes of neilsons. Different content providers, distributors, marketing agencies, etc. would want ratings info. Additional there were other "data mining" companies that build profiles based off public IP addresses that would want to use our data to enhance and augment their data. The other application that was the one that everybody was after want "interactive advertising". This would allow us to pop up an HTML5 app/page based on the ACR. So for example your selling a car, your ad comes up, you pop up your app and allow the user to schedule a test drive or look at the car in more detail. The use cases were endless though. The ACR technology ONLY worked on content that was viewed from the HDMI ports. Any built in apps like netflix or hulu that were run, ACR was force disabled. One thing I remember about that was that netflix is huge about NOBODY getting viewing data/ratings information about netflix and it's users. Only netflix has that data apparently. One somewhat reassuring thing about disabling the technology is at one point vizio did notice a bug on one of its TVs where ACR was not being disabled when the user opted out of "interactivity". This was a big deal and we were required to solve it ASAP. AMA if I missed something.
criley2 10y ago
Just further confirms that "Smart" TV's are a ripoff at best and a scam at worst. Never, ever, ever buy a television described as smart. For any reason at all. All of the solutions are miserably pathetic. All of the solutions are riddled with bugs, design omissions and potentially nasty security zero days. All implementations have little to no update support from major third parties. And, in many cases from many companies, the units spy on you as aggressively as could be to sell data for marketing purposes. "Smart" tv's are lose lose lose lose. You pay more, you get inferior software, inferior hardware and ultimately have your privacy abused. EDIT: To be fair, I love my Vizio dumb TV I just got. 40" 1080p dumb TV for $167 inc. taxes this past black friday. Got a HDR/4K Roku for an additional $70 and this TV is beautiful and the Roku is so much impossibly better in both hardware, software and third party support than any "smart" solution ever could be, and costs far less than the "smart" upgrade!
- antisthenes 10y ago
  I don't understand why someone just doesn't hook up their TV with their computer via HDMI or DP. Is switching sources too complicated for people? Even the shittiest Dell boxes these days have 2 video outputs, I believe, so you can run 1 monitor + TV. Most laptops have an extra video out port too. That way you can actually type on your keyboard when you search youtube, unlike typing with god forbid, a remote or an xbone controller (like a console peasant) By using a $5 cable, pretty much anyone can make a TV 'Smart', and not just smart, but smarter than the ones that are marketed as such.
  - JeremyBanks 10y ago
    Cluttering up my living room by running a cable across it isn't very attractive, nor is the general experience of using a non-stationary laptop with a giant cable hanging out of it. I much prefer using a Chromecast, or using my Xbox with a wireless keyboard (which I have stashed under the coffee table, within reach whenever I need it).
  - criley2 10y ago
    Because a full desktop UI is vastly inferior to a simple remote interface if you don't have a full mouse/kbb available, and having to have a mouse/kbb to, I don't know, pick a movie is very lame from a couch user perspective. Because you can get 4K/HDR with regularly updated high quality third party apps like Netflix from Roku for $80 with hardware that can handle it/ But a Media PC running Windows would require you to spend several multiples of 80$ to achieve 4k/HDR with a good remote. More work, more setup, more money, more configuration, and frankly the end result isn't better. Easier to use your PC as a media server, then use Roku to read from the server using a remote on your couch.
busted 10y ago
There is a comment on this article basically saying, "I bought a Vizio TV, later my email, bank account, and facebook got hacked, and now I know why." Shows roughly the understanding of these issues for some people.
GabrielSpenser 10y ago
i am very suspicious of my fiance of two years now that she's cheating on me, she has changed passwords to every account that she has, plus put a pin lock on her phone, i have been searching for ways to retrieve her text messages without installing any software on her phone or having access to it, so far i am not having any luck. we have a 19 year history together, plus a beautiful 18 year old daughter & this is eating me up inside. But i finally burst on this page from Google and found the God eye who changed my whole story for good! He help me hack her FB, her emails and her phone number and i got to see all his messages and apps from her phone. only for me to found out she's cheating and have a son out there without my consent but i thank the God eye for letting me know all this and am moving on fine with my life and my daughter. He's also involved in any sort of hacking issues. Hurray!! Get to him on (Godeyeviewhacker AT hotmail DOT com)

888 points by Deinos 10y ago

Huge schocker /s Pretty sure that Samsung does very similar things. I've been interested in actually capturing outgoing pcap data for this purpose. Looks like I have a new project to add the pile.

modoc 10y ago
Why do you think Samsung is doing this as well?
- jeanvaljean2463 10y ago
  http://www.myce.com/news/users-fix-samsung-smart-tv-time-two-workarounds-known-75148/ http://www.myce.com/news/users-fix-samsung-smart-tv-time-two... ( See comments about said Samsung TVs ) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771
  - modoc 10y ago
    I see DNS issues with SmartHub, etc.. but I don't see anyone suggesting that Samsung is capturing image data and sending it back? Not saying they aren't, but as an owner of two Samsung TVs, I'd be interested in any real evidence of them doing this type of thing..
    - jeanvaljean2463 10y ago
      Fair enough, probably my own paranoia at play. Replace "pretty sure" with "highly suspicious of the probability".
    - caconym_ 10y ago
      This happened a while ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/19/samsung-smart-tvs-send-unencrypted-voice-recognition-data-across-internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/19/samsung-s...
      - yincrash 10y ago
        However, as far as anyone has shown, that audio data is only when the user uses the voice functionality on the TV. They just were bad about encryption, but to use voice search, it made sense that they were sent data. That is remarkably different than recording image data every second from every television and sending that back.
        caconym_ 10y ago
        Not saying it's the same, just saying it's a potentially questionable (re privacy) thing Samsung has already been caught doing. Not sure if they were selling any of those data, anonymized or not, either. edit: It's also worth pointing out that while technical people (e.g. us) may see voice recognition tech and immediately suspect that it involves phoning home, most people probably have no idea that anything of what they say is leaving their living room.
- nanidin 10y ago
  It's in the privacy/TOS section on the Samsung TV I bought from Costco 3 months ago. "Interest Based Advertisement. Samsung provides the ability to obtain and view interactive and interest based advertising on your Smart TV. Interest based advertisements will rely on your TV viewing history and Smart TV usage information. Your viewing history includes information about the networks, channels, and programs viewed on your Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information." It is opt-out, and it's buried a couple levels deep in the menus.
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
capturing outgoing pcap data Why wouldn't that data be encrypted? All you would see is packets going to specific IP addresses. No way to analyze the contents. Of course, the data might not be encrypted. Why go thru the effort? Because of the large quantity of data being passed back and forth by almost all Internet connected devices, it's tedious to interpret what's happening even if the flows are completely open.
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  Experience would suggest the chances of the data being encrypted are very low.
- manarth 10y ago
  Why wouldn't that data be encrypted? Because manufacturers are rubbish? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/samsung_smart_tv_privacy_rewind/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/samsung_smart_tv_pri...
- computator 10y ago
  > The data might not be encrypted. Why go thru the effort? It's true that a lot of IoT devices communications are not encrypted. But what concerns me is that they'll start encrypting everything so that we can't analyze what's being transmitted. Not for our privacy but to prevent us from knowing what they're doing.
- jasonjayr 10y ago
  Speaking of encryption .... If they're capturing the image and sending it back to themselves for classification ... arn't they breaking their HDCP license?
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    I think they were only sampling areas of the screen.
ipsin 10y ago
One thing that I'd treat as a "tell" for how invasive Samsung's tracking is: how hard is it to disable the Smart TV functionality? For example, can you disable the wireless interface, or will it keep asking you to connect it to the internet? Does the TV itself ask you to agree to a EULA? I've been interested in the Samsung hardware, but only as a Dumb TV. This kind of data collection is not what I'd want.

csours 10y ago

>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. What’s more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs. > The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey for a total of $2.2 million.

nikanj 10y ago

Could we merge this with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771

troydavis 10y ago

It's amazing this was settled for a few million dollars. It's easy to imagine an alternative press release where the settlement was 10x or even 100x larger.

vonklaus 10y ago
but then Vizio wouldn't make a profit. The FTC has to make sure these companies continue to be profitable while itself appears to be semi-competent. Similarly, Verizons supercookie "crackdown" was laughable. FTC stands for Fuck the Consumer because that is their primary objective. edit: I phrased the above incorrectly. I meant to imply that the FTC is beholden to these companies and largely does their bidding. Except in narrow circumstances, the FTC really is a tool of the major corporations it is supposed to regulate. Fuck the FTC.
- teach 10y ago
  I suspect if you rewrote this comment without using such emotionally-charged and loaded language you might have gotten more upvotes. Let me give it a try. "Unfortunately, the FTC has an interest in keeping companies profitable, so any punitive measures take a back seat."
  - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
    without using such emotionally-charged and loaded language Except that "Fuck the Consumer" seems like a nice clear description of the situation.
  - tps5 10y ago
    Sometimes "fuck" isn't emotionally charged. Sometimes it's just the more accurate term.
acdha 10y ago
Call (not email, not Twitter) your Congressional representatives and remind them. Agencies act within laws which make certain things easier or harder and they're probably going to settle if the alternative is a lot more work.

ComputerGuru 10y ago

A 2.2M settlement is absolute peanuts compared to the mountains of cash they likely made.

thenayr 10y ago
Yeah not much of a punishment to discourage further abuse. Should have fined them on a ratio of the number of data points they collected (100 billion). Even a 100:1 seems like a reasonable punishment for this scale of abuse ($1 billion)
- KSS42 10y ago
  There probably will be a class action lawsuit.
  - billh 10y ago
    Which will be settled with a coupon for $12.00 off the purchase of your next Vizio Smart TV.
- harryh 10y ago
  The idea that the data that they collected was worth $1B is laughable.
  - kilotaras 10y ago
    Fine should be bigger than price of the data. Expected return from 'illegal' activity E = R - p * F, where R is revenue, F is fine and p is probability of getting caught. p < 1, so if F < R engaging in such activity is a rational, if immoral, choice.
Saad_M 10y ago
The reputational damage is in some ways will be bigger than the fine itself.
- 10y ago

werber 10y ago

Are they shielded from a class action suit now?

abandonliberty 10y ago

This is promising and is a good start towards IOT precedent, and perhaps even operating systems of our devices (Windows 10). - Explain your data collection practices up front. - Get consumers’ consent before you collect and share highly specific information about their entertainment preferences. - Make it easy for consumers to exercise options. - Established consumer protection principles apply to new technology. I wonder how many technical teams are scrambling to undo their spying now - though this is a fairly insubstantial fine. I could see the data being potentially worth more than $2.2m

Smerity 10y ago
To note, they were also forced to delete the collected data, though the insights they've already extracted / profits from data they've already sold may offset both the point and the $2.2 million fine.
- abandonliberty 10y ago
  You're right, good insight. I was thinking purely about risk/reward for other players in the market. The fine is 0.4% of the Note 7 recall cost, not including brand damage. A fine this nominal could easily be seen as the cost of doing business - if you get caught.
  - codedokode 10y ago
    If they really have sold 10 million devices then the fine is 22 cents per device.
- cwilkes 10y ago
  Vizio might be able to delete the data but there is not much of a chance that the data brokers they sold to can. Probably already baked into their models. Plus how is this verifiable? The fine should be a lot higher to discourage this action.
joering2 10y ago
> I wonder how many technical teams are scrambling to undo their spying now I bet the one that truly have to worry in terms of size calculated that the cost of undoing it will overweight the cost of eventual penalty, underscoring word "eventual".

passivepinetree 10y ago

The amount of money they made from that data is probably orders of magnitude more than the paltry $2.2 million penalty. I hate to get all paranoid, but it seems like every day there's news of a company's data being hacked, and what information isn't being hacked is being actively sold. What can an average citizen do (short of living Ron Swanson-style in a cabin in the woods) to protect their privacy?

Narkov 10y ago
"orders of magnitude more" ? As in, ~$200m? No chance. With a little bit of industry knowledge, I would posit that they made roughly the same quantum as the fine.
- passivepinetree 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on your industry knowledge? I'm not in the industry so I'm curious. I would guess that Vizio would have been able to demand a premium for that data.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10y ago
  So basically, it pays to engage in unethical behavior, because if you do get caught, the fine will usually not be more than the profit you made from said behavior.
  - bredren 10y ago
    Obviously. Whatsapp broke privacy law in Canada and across Europe to hack growth. Different industry, but Four Loko also was penalized for its risky (but great for some people) original formula.
- mbesto 10y ago
  > Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. That type of technology alone would cost you at least $2M to build. So either your statement is incorrect or Vizio got a terrible ROI on this (sans fine).

jasonwilk 10y ago

It's not worth buying any of these 'Smart' TVs. I don't know whether it is a shoddy developer experience provided by the likes of Samsung / Vizeo etc or if it's the developers themselves (Hulu I'm looking at you) who do not maintain their apps which are constantly bug filled. I much prefer my old dumb TV that has a Roku plugged into it. Oh yeah, and I know it's not WATCHING ME.

wrsh07 10y ago
If you want a high end tv you don't have much choice. But also, why do you not expect your Roku / apple tv / etc to be watching you?
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > If you want a high end tv you don't have much choice. Don't connect it to the Internet? Barring the manufacturer sneaking a backup cellular modem in there, seems like it's an easy fix.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    They can nag you about retrieving updates.
    - Relys 10y ago
      root it then! Any kid that knows how to point the libstagefright and DirtyCOW MetaSploit modules at the browser can root their "smart" TV...
      - khedoros1 10y ago
        Better option: Buy a different TV that requires less effort to make acceptable, unless there's a huge price incentive to buy the more troublesome TV and "fix" it.
      - Clubber 10y ago

bitmapbrother 10y ago

Now that we know what they did the class action lawsuits should follow. If your concerned about privacy don't connect your TV to the Internet. Treat it like the dumb screen it's supposed to be and just cast or route content to it.

kevin_b_er 10y ago

This is why you do not use a smart TV: Nefarious data collection on what you watch and Samsungs are known to demand to show ads or else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585132 https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/241500-samsung-smart-tv-update-forces-users-see-ads https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/241500-samsung-smart... http://www.techtimes.com/articles/190222/20161227/samsung-smart-tvs-shove-ads-down-users-throats-and-no-theres-no-real-opt-out.htm http://www.techtimes.com/articles/190222/20161227/samsung-sm... I'm also, for political reasons, suspicious of the FTC's willingness to pursue such cases in the future.

xanderstrike 10y ago
Can you recommend a 50" 1080p tv that isn't "smart"? I've been shopping for a new one and I strongly suspect they don't exist.
- kelnos 10y ago
  Do they work okay (sans "smart" features) if you just decline to connect them to a network?
- bcook 10y ago
  Search for Commercial TVs. I saw someone mention this in another thread on here.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Last time around, I elected to buy a smaller "dumb" TV, and just sit closer to it. I learned my lesson very early, with LG as my teacher. If I really had to get a large display, I'd just make it a big computer monitor and add a separate sound setup, or I'd spend the gratuitous extra markup on a commercial "digital signage" display. Either way, I'd probably have to route all TV-related functions through a set-top box with HDMI output, like a DVR, cable/satellite box, or HTPC.

tps5 10y ago

> Consumers have bought more than 11 million internet-connected Vizio televisions since 2010 11 million televisions. 2.2 million penalty. 20 cents per television.

mathgeek 10y ago

I wonder how many meetings were called at other manufacturers when this went public, both to check on what they themselves were doing, and to make plans to stop doing it where relevant.

gesman 10y ago

>>The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC >>and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey Read: FTC and New Jersey decided to made money off consumers too by charging Vizio a little tax. "Protected by law" consumers got: $0.

mikeryan 10y ago

So I have a bit of intimate knowledge of this. Not sure what I can answer but for years my company worked on an Automatic Content Recognition project using tools from a team called Cognitive Networks who were bought by Vizio and makes up the tech that did this. If I understand correctly the founder of Vizio kept this tech for himself in the sale of Vizio. When developing this we would work directly with Cognitive checking sync'd apps. We knew for a long time that they could see our content in their office while we tested. Note LG got caught on this about 2-3 years ago and made ACR apps opt-in which pretty much killed it for LG. AFAIK Samsung never did the exact same thing a bunch of providers saw the writing on the wall and dumped this sort of technology a few years back. It had some really cool applications for interactive sync to broadcast apps but the privacy concerns killed it for a lot for a lot of manufacturers.

AJ007 10y ago
Thanks for posting this. When I saw the original FTC story I recalled reading about this once or twice in the past but couldn't think of any key phrases or sources. In response to some of the other comments here, basically what they are guilty of isn't spying but failing to properly disclose and opt-in users. There is a particular major AV vendor who is selling raw clickstream data of millions of their user's internet usage directly to marketers and other parties right now. As far as I can tell, as long as it is buried somewhere in the terms and conditions no one cares. Of course, other companies that are actually serving the content are doing far more than just passively monitoring your viewing habits. From my best guess, Facebook is logging every signal it can from content/pictures/videos it displays to users. Even if you didn't click like, comment, or click through the link it knows the story captured your attention. I had an interesting case with Instagram where after viewing enough pictures of women's butts it started also showing men's bare butts in my feed too.. at least until I never opened any of them, and they disappeared. Users should consider that content providers are going to have extremely deep data sets of even the most minute dimensions of their political leanings, porn viewing habits, dating preferences, and gullibilities. All of this will make what TV shows you watched between Netflix and NBC beyond mundane. With an open web, where we get content from the source, this shouldn't actually be possible. Thank the platform business model.

JohnBooty 10y ago

If nobody's started one yet, I think there would be an audience for a blog/vlog/whatever that reviews non-smart TVs. And/or a place that evaluates which "smart" TVs function acceptably as "dumb" when they are not connected to a network. Realistically, this would have to include evaluating things beside consumer TVs for use as living room devices, since "smart" features in consumer TVs are nearly unavoidable at this point. Because I'm going to have to start looking into the world of commercial displays for my next TV, I guess. At least I think those don't have "smart" features. Yet?

tracker1 10y ago
Personally, I'd be pretty happy with very high quality monitor-only sets... I mostly run everything through my AVR anyways. Though some of the smart tv options are getting compelling, I tend to find the integrated devices are always a letdown after a couple years.
- kelnos 10y ago
  Yeah, same: I expect a TV to last a decade or more, but I expect a smart TV features to become out of date about as quickly as most smartphones do. And I never expect drastic updates for those sorts of things; the TV company's revenue stream depends on you buying a new TV more frequently than I'd plan to. I think a separate device like a ChromeCast or Apple TV is a much better choice.
swsieber 10y ago
I'd also like non-smart Blu-ray players. Well, speaking over HDMI is okay, but no internet crap.
- dzdt 10y ago
  Internet crap is a required part of the Blu-ray standard.
ams6110 10y ago
I think it's not just TVs. Any internet-connected home devices have to be viewed with suspicion until proven to be good household citizens.

fencepost 10y ago

This sounds like an excellent reason to simply never connect the TV to the Internet and to simply connect your own system to the TV whether it be a stick PC or something with a little more oompf.

pdimitar 10y ago
That's what I plan to do but it still makes me nervous that the "smart" part of the TV might secretly contact my router and ask for network access. I have zero proof but I became paranoid recently. :( The reasonable tradeoff would be to buy a high-quality "dumb" TV with a very good screen. At least I hope so.
- tucif 10y ago
  > Ask for network access Assuming you have a decent router that supports wpa2 I find it difficult to believe a TV would crack it.
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    Agreed, but. Most just bug you about 'updates' ad nausem until you have a moment of weakness and punch it in. At least some will autoconnect to open wifi. Sure YOURS is locked down, but what about your neighbors? Just 'turning it "off"' is not enough for even casual security.
    - pdimitar 10y ago
      Exactly what you said. Even if I do my very best to secure my router and blacklist the TV's Mac address (and never give it the wifi password), how do I know that my neighbours won't mistakenly let their WiFi open for a day or two until they realize their mistake? Or if I tether my mobile data from my phone and turn into a router, that I might forget to secure it? All it takes is one small slip. I'd rather never take the risk. I'll just look for a dumb huge TV; I need 65+ inches, good luck to me, right?
      - 10y ago

guscost 10y ago

I got a supposedly "smart" TV at a ludicrous price the other day, maybe because there are already surplus units that nobody wants? It's a Roku/Sharp combo thing so there are no numbers on the remote either, but the UI is actually pretty darn good. And no, I would never connect my cheapo TV to the Internet. Come on.

msmith10101 10y ago

How did Vizio get caught? Was it a whistle blower? https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-watching-you https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-...

pdimitar 10y ago

"Vizio has agreed to stop unauthorized tracking". As if there's any human-measurable way of confirming this. Yes they can be forced by a court. And no, the court can't know if they stopped all of the software copies on all TVs and no, the court can't know if they didn't re-activate them in the future back again. What actual proof do we have that LG actually stopped? What actual proof can we have that Vizio will stop doing this?

abraae 10y ago
Vizio is not an individual, it's a collection of employees and contractors, some loyal, and others who hate their corporate overlord and would love nothing better that to dob them in if they ever sneakily resumed the spying.
- pdimitar 10y ago
  It's pretty sad that this is our only hope for an OEM that doesn't spy on its users, isn't it?
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Where were these noble folks earlier?
  - nxc18 10y ago
    This wasn't an issue earlier. It was a known public fact. I stumbled upon the marketing page for this feature about a year ago by accident without even attempting to find it. What Visio is doing has so little impact on privacy that it is embarrassing for our regulatory system that this is what they took action on.
digikata 10y ago
Well, one could monitor all outgoing packets from your smart TV, but you would also need to know exactly how to decode what was contained those packets... unless of course they conveniently set the evil bit for you. With the poor level of development associated with this type of work, it would probably be enough to identify a different set servers for receiving the data. With more sophisticated coding, you really do have to know what's in every outgoing packet. Perhaps it reduces down to problems similar to the discovery path of the VW Diesel emissions cheat - taking an interested hacker/researcher to examine the compliance.

calvinbhai 10y ago

With Vizio and other Dolby HDR compatible TVs you'll have to keep it connected if they intend to get firmware updates. I wonder which TV will be ideal for purchase, now that Samsung and Vizio have been caught hoodwinking their customers.

kofejnik 10y ago
why do you want firmware updates? they will only bring more tracking
- givinguflac 10y ago
  Fixes and improvements.
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    Remember when products worked out of the box?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      This. I'm conflicted about updates. On the one hand, people screaming "but security!!111~1" have some pretty good points - especially when talking about internet-connected devices. On the other hand, shit used to work out of the box in the past, and most updates that are not security patches seem to only introduce useless crap and bloat software more.
- calvinbhai 10y ago
  only reason, with Vizio, is if you buy a 4k HDR TV thats Dolby HDR compatible and a year or two later HDR 10 becomes the standard and Dolby HDR dies, then Vizio 'can' update the TV to be compatible with HDR 10. Otherwise, its safe I guess to keep it disconnected.

awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago

Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. I would like to know more about that process. I find it ethically abhorrent, but technically very interesting. Like, is it grabbing, say, three pixels in constant locations across the screen and matching their color change over time? Is it examining a whole block? Is it averaging a block at some proportional location on the screen?

cracell 10y ago
I'm also curious if they'd be able to match different encodings of the same video or would only be able to match against specific encodings in their collection.
- nikmobi 10y ago
  I would imagine it's simply a temporal comparison of pixel colors at predetermined locations, similar to how the Shazam algorithm[1] works? You'd just need to analyze enough pixels to reduce "collisions", coupled with the temporal aspect! [1] https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
- mikeryan 10y ago
  It's not encoding based - its frame based, basically bitmap data. It has to be to work across the whole video delivery pipeline so it's fairly fuzzy but also accurate. They need a source to compare too so when we worked on it masters were being sent from the network to the sync technology group. So they had source data for comparison on the first broadcast of a show. Outside of latency there's no reason they can't match against broadcast content off cable. For user tracking they can just log the fingerprint data and compare it later to source data for analytics so this works fine.
mikeryan 10y ago
The terms of art are Automatic Content Recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition and Video Fingerprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting You can dive in from there but it's basically either watermarking or fingerprinting of video and or audio frames. Video was preferred because there were fewer false positives from music beds. In a nutshell its video Shazam

myrandomcomment 10y ago

So there was a setting to turn their tracking off if you dug into the menus. I turned it off on my set. I hope it covered that feature.

ben174 10y ago
It's called Smart Interactivity and it's so far tucked away it's blatantly obvious they intended to hide it. As I recall it was in the 'System Reset' menu for some inexplicable reason.

whalesalad 10y ago

On a similar note, can anyone here speak to the hidden audio signal that is broadcast over the air with things like sporting events? I noticed it once when Google Now knew instantaneously that I was watching a specific NFL football game and began displaying the score. It felt magical but after a little research there are hidden frequencies that reveal this information.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jaimex2 10y ago

I caught my TV doing this and went to war. For the last two years I have had a service running that floods garbage data back to the collection point from several addresses throughout the Internet. You're welcome.

hoppa_liza 10y ago
Care to elaborate on this? How you caught it, what and how are you sending back to them?
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I'm curious too. Do you have a blog post detailing it?
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    Can't speak for OP, but my solution involved the words pfSense, tcpdump, bro, and squid.
hueving 10y ago
Well played. This is the kind of stuff botnets should be put to work doing. :)
voltagex_ 10y ago
I know we can't expect the "average" consumer to do this, but thanks for caring and running tcpdump on your network! It amazes me that with a lot of these stories there's no one popping up with a pcap showing exactly what's going on. I'm hoping projects like Turris Omnia [1] will allow people to be more in control of what goes in and out of the LAN - my network, my rules. 1: https://omnia.turris.cz/en/ https://omnia.turris.cz/en/
- ktta 10y ago
  You don't really need a open source router. Just something that can be flashed with Openwrt or dd-wrt. The router you linked actually runs a fork of Openwrt. https://openwrt.org/ https://openwrt.org/

hueving 10y ago

Wow, those punishments are pathetic for sampling private movies you watched (e.g. porn) on your TV and funneling that information off with IP address to advertisers.

silveira 10y ago

> Consumers have bought more than 11 million internet-connected Vizio televisions since 2010. > The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey for a total of $2.2 million. > Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others. $2.2 million / 11 million tvs = $0.20 per tv

jaclaz 10y ago
To be picky, the thingy was introduced "only" in 2014, so maybe "only" 4.5 million tv affected, that would raise the cost for the company to a whopping $0.50/each, more than double what you calculated but still peanuts ...

firefoxd 10y ago

I have a Vizio TV, can i disable tracking?

firefoxd 10y ago
Nevermind. I found it. Let's hope it does what it says it does. http://i.imgur.com/aXThhIg.jpg http://i.imgur.com/aXThhIg.jpg
incongruity 10y ago
The linked article makes it sound like it was hidden under an obscurely named preference, so you should be able to.

hoodoof 10y ago

Ironic that the government should be so concerned about spying.

segmondy 10y ago

This is ridiculous, I wish someone with money would create an absolute shitstorm by buying this kind of data, buying data from Facebook, google, twitter, internet cable companies, state departments, combining them, deanonymizing millions of users and dumping them. Until something crazy like this happens nothing will happen, it needs to be brought to the light. Until then, no regulation will ever happen on data collection on users and we will all be sheep and the product. Crazy thing, it won't cost that much money. Folks need to wake up and be scared shit less. Everything spies on you, your pace maker, your fitbit, your car, your TV, your fridge, watch. 1984 ain't got shit on this! :-(

agotterer 10y ago

How are fines that are as little as this supposed to deter future companies from sketchy collection practices? One can only assume they made more than $3.7M selling illegally collected data. There's no incentive for companies to do better and not be shady. It pays to roll the dice and see if you get caught. If you do just say sorry and pay a small fine.

jps359 10y ago
It seems a bit odd... spying on people on a massive scale, nobody goes to jail and only a $2M fine

scarface74 10y ago

If they were aggregating and selling this information to television networks, as a better way of measuring how many viewers a show had, I would be okay with that. It may help keep some of my favorite shows on air. But to sell my individual viewing habits with my IP address? Not okay.

diamondlovesyou 10y ago

What I'm about to say may go against what many of the HN community believes. This isn't an attack on anyone's beliefs; I'm merely expressing my thoughts in an attempt to solicit constructive discourse. I'mma be honest. I don't understand the repulsion at the possibility of corporation X knowing my personal info, (excluding the usual things like bank account info, SSNs, etc) like my location, search history, etc. To be clear, I'm 10000000% against warrantless (FISA court "warrants" excluded) government access to this information. Here's my reasoning: * Governments Have the power to arrest and detain on a whim. Not to mention, use drone strikes. * Corporations ... Don't. These entities have self-interested incentives to provide tools which are economically productive for users. For example, a smarter smartphone, whatever that may be. Regarding Vizio, my grip is that Vizio's goal (for this product at least) is to make a profit producing TVs. So, after the TV is sold, the product is individually "finished" (not considering support stuff). So, then, what other product is the data collection for, and what does this product give me in return for my data? The answer to both is no, and not just for Vizio. Maybe I'm naive.

DavidSJ 10y ago
What do you think the corporation does with your personal info when the government asks for it?
mindviews 10y ago
It's the lack of transparency that's the real problem. I like to know as much as I can when something I own is sharing personally identifiable data about me and my habits to companies (and governments). The fact that the whole effort on Vizio's part was under the radar means that consumers lacked important information about the functioning of their TV's. If they had known about the depth and breadth of the data collection, maybe some portion of purchasers would have made other decisions. Once that's on the table, then you're free to make the choice to let that data be shared if you're comfortable with it (as you indicate you'd be in your case).
- irontoby 10y ago
  Yes, yes, yes. For example I am perfectly okay with Google slurping up every bit of data they can about me, tracking my every move etc. because the benefit I receive (i.e. really spooky-accurate suggestions & info in Google Now) is worth the privacy tradeoff. Also, based on their past actions and statements, my level of trust with them is very high that they will be transparent with their uses of that data and that they will diligently guard against that data being put to other uses that they or I didn't allow. But what Vizio has done here makes it perfectly clear that providing any benefit to the end users was never their goal and that keeping the true nature of this program secret was an intentional act. That's enough to ensure I'll never buy a Vizio product in the future.

knodi 10y ago

3.7mill is not enough of a fine. The fine should have been 50mill plus.

brangalina4eva 10y ago
plus jail time
jaclaz 10y ago
... and it's not even 3.7 millon, the total is seemingly 2.2 million including the 1.5 million FTC: >The order also includes a $1.5 million payment to the FTC and an additional civil penalty to New Jersey for a total of $2.2 million. Or am I reading it wrongly?

sitkack 10y ago

How is this not an illegal wiretap? Shouldn't executives and employees at all the involved companies go to jail?

an_account 10y ago
Because wiretaps are for telephones...

nojvek 10y ago

Consumers want the best service at the cheapest price. Producers want to maximize the profit on products and services. Advertisers want the best return on investment for their ad dollars so they also maximise profit. This are fundamental thruths of the market. It's why Google and Facebook are behemoths. The only way to win the game is precision tracking, addictive services and building good models of customer behavior for advertising.

rasz_pl 10y ago

Do you watch cable? Every single settopbox is designed in a way that makes tracking viewing habits trivial and every cable company does this.

neotek 10y ago

"Smart" TVs are the worst TVs I've ever used, I really don't understand the appeal whatsoever. They're almost universally clunky and slow with horrific UI / UX choices and painfully high latency on simple things like browsing a list of files or even just registering button presses, provide fuck all useful benefit over and above the regular TV experience, are usually running some long-deprecated version of Android which is riddled with security holes that will never get patched - why does anyone actually want this? A Raspberry Pi running OSMC is everything you could ever want out of a home media setup, it'll work with good old regular "dumb" TVs that can't invade your privacy, with an interface so simple your grandparents can use it, and can be put together for well under $50.

LordJZ 10y ago
And then there's Tizen which is even worse than Android Smart TVs. Dad bought a Samsung Smart TV with Tizen (even though I begged him to change his mind and buy a better solution for half the price) and expecting the worst I was _still_ suprised what an absolute piece of garbage that TV is.

noonespecial 10y ago

Well, looks like old Orwell got the Telescreen just about right. "Facecrime" turned out to be something a little different though...

myrandomcomment 10y ago

1. Press the Menu button or open the HDTV Settings. 2. Select System. 3. Select Reset & Admin. 4. Select Smart Interactivity. 5. Right arrow to Off.

dewiz 10y ago

I wonder if Comcast does the same, they can even cache user interests locally waiting for a connection to be available.

amq 10y ago

Want a dumb TV? Disconnect it from internet and have your Roku etc.

skc 10y ago

The cynic in me believes that Vizio are probably just a few years too early.

chinathrow 10y ago

I wonder how you can work on such a setup as an engineer with morale, colleting 100B data points _daily_ without telling your customers...

kelvin0 10y ago

Vizio: Clash of the Titans, when capitalism is at odds with individual privacy

codedokode 10y ago

The law is not strict enough. No single byte should be sent outside without user's consent. No matter whether it contains personal data or not. And that would make proving company's guilt much easier.

jlebrech 10y ago

this sound like a reverse-DRM, they can they figure out if you're watching pirated content then send you a bill. this cheap unknown brand doesn't look so cheap now does it.

usgroup 10y ago

May be worth noting that AV companies and privacy guards also sometimes operate on this model. E.g Avast and Ghostery.

a3n 10y ago

I wonder how many of these Vizio TVs are in government offices, recording and selling their IPs, pixels, preferences and schedules. Remember, it's not just broadcast, it's also from DVD players. Anything displayed. And I wonder who's buying, and then correlating IPs and devices, besides the obvious advertisers. The potential for espionage and extortion is interesting. "That's an interesting fetish you got there, Mr third or fourth down on the org chart who does the actual day to day running of the agency. It'd be a shame if it was to be ... exposed."

daveheq 10y ago

Yah but Trump's going to get rid of the FTC and regulations that get in the way of business, such as spying on you and selling your watching habits and personal info to a bunch of other companies.

zeropoint46 10y ago

So I actually worked at cognitive networks up until the end of 2014. I've read this thread and thought I would address some things here that didn't seem to get fully concrete answers (in no particular order). The ACR technology that cognitive used was/is in vizio and LG tvs. during the time I worked there we only had a deal to use it actively on vizio tvs. I guess lg was just testing the waters to see how it'd work. The ACR technology that CG used is based on RGB values from sampled patches on regions of the image. There was no audio finger printing used. There were a number of items that would mess up the "recognition". Some of those included aspect ratio of content, watermarks from different providers, overlays and basically anything that modified either the size of the original image or obstructed it. For the server infrastructure, what we did was we ingested live feeds from the major network providers, these feeds had to be ahead of what tvs were watching by at least 5-10 seconds so we actually had the fingerprint data in our database to be recognized. we would pair the ingested fingerprints to TV scheduling data and voila, we "knew" what you were watching. Now clearly if we didn't have the content in our database we had no idea what was being shown on your screen. What did we use the ACR data for. Well there were 2 "deals" going on while I was there. One was ratings, something to compete with the likes of neilsons. Different content providers, distributors, marketing agencies, etc. would want ratings info. Additional there were other "data mining" companies that build profiles based off public IP addresses that would want to use our data to enhance and augment their data. The other application that was the one that everybody was after want "interactive advertising". This would allow us to pop up an HTML5 app/page based on the ACR. So for example your selling a car, your ad comes up, you pop up your app and allow the user to schedule a test drive or look at the car in more detail. The use cases were endless though. The ACR technology ONLY worked on content that was viewed from the HDMI ports. Any built in apps like netflix or hulu that were run, ACR was force disabled. One thing I remember about that was that netflix is huge about NOBODY getting viewing data/ratings information about netflix and it's users. Only netflix has that data apparently. One somewhat reassuring thing about disabling the technology is at one point vizio did notice a bug on one of its TVs where ACR was not being disabled when the user opted out of "interactivity". This was a big deal and we were required to solve it ASAP. AMA if I missed something.

criley2 10y ago

Just further confirms that "Smart" TV's are a ripoff at best and a scam at worst. Never, ever, ever buy a television described as smart. For any reason at all. All of the solutions are miserably pathetic. All of the solutions are riddled with bugs, design omissions and potentially nasty security zero days. All implementations have little to no update support from major third parties. And, in many cases from many companies, the units spy on you as aggressively as could be to sell data for marketing purposes. "Smart" tv's are lose lose lose lose. You pay more, you get inferior software, inferior hardware and ultimately have your privacy abused. EDIT: To be fair, I love my Vizio dumb TV I just got. 40" 1080p dumb TV for $167 inc. taxes this past black friday. Got a HDR/4K Roku for an additional $70 and this TV is beautiful and the Roku is so much impossibly better in both hardware, software and third party support than any "smart" solution ever could be, and costs far less than the "smart" upgrade!

antisthenes 10y ago
I don't understand why someone just doesn't hook up their TV with their computer via HDMI or DP. Is switching sources too complicated for people? Even the shittiest Dell boxes these days have 2 video outputs, I believe, so you can run 1 monitor + TV. Most laptops have an extra video out port too. That way you can actually type on your keyboard when you search youtube, unlike typing with god forbid, a remote or an xbone controller (like a console peasant) By using a $5 cable, pretty much anyone can make a TV 'Smart', and not just smart, but smarter than the ones that are marketed as such.
- JeremyBanks 10y ago
  Cluttering up my living room by running a cable across it isn't very attractive, nor is the general experience of using a non-stationary laptop with a giant cable hanging out of it. I much prefer using a Chromecast, or using my Xbox with a wireless keyboard (which I have stashed under the coffee table, within reach whenever I need it).
- criley2 10y ago
  Because a full desktop UI is vastly inferior to a simple remote interface if you don't have a full mouse/kbb available, and having to have a mouse/kbb to, I don't know, pick a movie is very lame from a couch user perspective. Because you can get 4K/HDR with regularly updated high quality third party apps like Netflix from Roku for $80 with hardware that can handle it/ But a Media PC running Windows would require you to spend several multiples of 80$ to achieve 4k/HDR with a good remote. More work, more setup, more money, more configuration, and frankly the end result isn't better. Easier to use your PC as a media server, then use Roku to read from the server using a remote on your couch.

busted 10y ago

There is a comment on this article basically saying, "I bought a Vizio TV, later my email, bank account, and facebook got hacked, and now I know why." Shows roughly the understanding of these issues for some people.

GabrielSpenser 10y ago

i am very suspicious of my fiance of two years now that she's cheating on me, she has changed passwords to every account that she has, plus put a pin lock on her phone, i have been searching for ways to retrieve her text messages without installing any software on her phone or having access to it, so far i am not having any luck. we have a 19 year history together, plus a beautiful 18 year old daughter & this is eating me up inside. But i finally burst on this page from Google and found the God eye who changed my whole story for good! He help me hack her FB, her emails and her phone number and i got to see all his messages and apps from her phone. only for me to found out she's cheating and have a son out there without my consent but i thank the God eye for letting me know all this and am moving on fine with my life and my daughter. He's also involved in any sort of hacking issues. Hurray!! Get to him on (Godeyeviewhacker AT hotmail DOT com)