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Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than TVs themselves
- filoeleven 5y agoThe source link should be https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021 https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver... The rest is Cory Doctorow’s useless pontification, and an anchor link that doesn’t work.
- lvs 5y agoI was surprised there was no mention of Windows Telemetry and the myriad dark patterns like forced updates introduced in Windows 10. That was the end of the road for me with Microsoft.
- musicale 5y ago> Apple has a tactical commitment to your privacy, not a moral one. When it comes down to guarding your privacy or losing access to Chinese markets and manufacturing, your privacy is jettisoned without a second thought. I keep telling Tim Cook that he (and Apple) needs to take a stand for privacy by stopping manufacturing and selling iPhones in China, but he never does. I wonder why not?
- BirdPlusPlus 5y agoI love the article despite the partisan political bickering on the tail end. There's more common ground available on these issues from Trump's right wing supporters than what might appear so at first. There's an artfully constructed corporate smokescreen of fear propaganda intended to make those common interests unpursuable. It makes us mutual boogeymen and causes us to intellectually inbreed - liberals and conservatives are not healthy ideologically without good-faith interchange.
- saiya-jin 5y agoI thought this is well-known, read about it quite some time ago. Something about suspiciously low prices of their products in age of surveillance. Same vein as ie Xiaomi or Huawei in cell phones.
- nixgeek 5y agoI found this article nearly impossible to read, it’s just so angry. It’s accusatory at every moment, it maligns essentially all of the worlds largest technology companies in an introduction before even getting to Vizio (the point of the article, per the title). I often feel this extreme writing style hurts more than it helps. Very difficult to convince people your cause is just with this tack?
- pessimizer 5y agoYou can't decide whether something is credible by looking for a tone of even-handedness. It's a misleading signal that rules out the possibility that all of the facts are on one side or another, and people who are trying to fool you will always adopt a tone of even-handedness.
- benreesman 5y agoI like hyperbolic feisty writing sometimes just as I like really spicy food sometimes. Some people never like really spicy food, but that doesn’t mean restaurants shouldn’t serve it.
- CamperBob2 5y agoI do, too, but Cory Doctorow usually brings more craft to the table than what's evident here. This reads more like an angsty high-school dropout's application to join an anarchist commune. He's not wrong, but then, neither was Stallman.
- anuvrat1 5y agoI wouldn't consider this “extreme writing style”, author define what this so-called “ad-economy” then they get into, every one tries to show that they aren't part of it, but they are. Then there is the main point of the article, which is Vizio doesn't care about being clean and undercutting competition. A good chuck of Vizio's customer knows what they are buying, unlike companies like Samsung; charging premium price, “caring” about their customers but still involving in the same practices as Vizio. And the author gets the point across, so this is a decent article.
- renewiltord 5y agoYep, I worked directly in ad tech with them. Honestly, I thought it was great. We get better and better hardware available for cheaper and you can always pay more for a different brand and not have ads.
- 542458 5y agoThe problem there is that it’s not always obvious ahead of time what does and doesn’t have ads, and that on occasion manufacturers decide to ad advertisements after the fact. Additionally, many people are unaware of the nature of the data being gathered about them, so they’re not actually making an informed decision here.
- renewiltord 5y agoI certainly agree. My gold standard is the way Amazon sells their Fire tablets. You can explicitly choose the ad or adfree version (which implicitly informs you about the aggregate life time revenue on the ads - about $20).
- quantified 5y agoYeah, we’ve just entered the world where you will get shown ads if you don’t pay more. There will always be some top price point that has an ad-free experience available because the Koch brothers won’t stand for ads. Are the ads only on the versions that cost $99, or are they on the $500 and $1000 models? Did the hardware significantly change for the price point, or did the ad-free price point rise?
- candiddevmike 5y agoAnd the only difference between those models is the software most likely. Jailbreaking TVs when?
- quantified 5y agoWill they function if you just cut off their internet?
- throw63738 5y agoGood, cheaper displays for Pi with Kodi.
- bshipp 5y agoIs it that difficult to build an open source Visio firmware that strips all the ads and has it operating like consumers want? Seems fair play if they're already ignoring open source licenses in the first place. I'd look into it but I don't have a Vizio box. Edit: seems like this is a place to start looking: https://github.com/spartan263/vizio_oss https://github.com/spartan263/vizio_oss
- rollcat 5y agoI would look into removing the "computer" that is doing the spying, and driving the panel itself directly (eg from an Apple TV, Raspberry Pi, whatever you consider trustworthy). The panels usually use eDP, MIPI/DSI or (in case of older laptops) LVDS internally. I've seen it done - a friend swapped the screens on two completely different laptops - one did work, and well, one didn't ;) but 50% success rate for a random guy with a screwdriver is not bad. I wonder what would happen if we could identify a particular cheap, mass-produced, high-quality screen / panel that'd be easy to DIY.
- throaway46546 5y agoI just removed the WiFi card from my TV.
- ksec 5y agoThe correct headline should be Vizio makes more money by selling ads than selling TV themselves. We are only a month to 2022. This shouldn't even be a news headline. There are also plenty of other TV brands that does something similar. It is the whole reason why you can buy a 4K 55" TV for a $~450. And a lot of people knows this. So for the past few years it turns out plenty of people are willing to sell their watching habits for a cheaper TV. Unfortunately TV business in itself is a low margin business. Unless Apple decide to do something about it I dont think there are any company that could change the game much if at all.
- pfranz 5y ago> So for the past few years it turns out plenty of people are willing to sell their watching habits for a cheaper TV. The problem is that when it's endemic and not clearly labeled is that paying more may not do any good. Companies are very happy to charge you more to pretend you get something extra.
- hammock 5y agoI didn't know it and i wouldn't have guessed it was worth this much.
- chuckee 5y ago> And a lot of people knows this. So for the past few years it turns out plenty of people are willing to sell their watching habits for a cheaper TV. Because every TV has all the ways it spies on you listed as prominently as the price? And there's a near identical model for sale next to it, without the spying-enabled discounts? Framing this as consumer choice implies consumers were informed and given a choice, but they were neither.
- rootusrootus 5y agoPerhaps something I actually appreciate about Amazon's devices. At least their Kindles with ads. They give you a choice between seeing ads, and not seeing them, and put a price on it. If ad revenue is a meaningful amount of the price of a new TV, then I'd definitely like the option to buy one with all of it disabled (with a permanent legal guarantee to back it up).
- fencepost 5y agoThe original source for that part of the linked article is https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021 https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver... Numbers come from Vizio's reporting. Basically profits of 25 million on TVs and 50+ million on advertising
- avalys 5y agoAnyone who uses the terms "spying" and "surveillance" to characterize this business model is being misleading in order to push an agenda. These terms imply some kind of personal connection. The police will put a suspect under "surveillance". Someone might "spy" on their spouse to see if they're cheating. These are the sorts of scenarios that these terms call to mind. These imply a deliberate and focused invasion of privacy by another person who is specifically looking to uncover and reveal some information that you want to keep secret, in order to use it against your interests. This really has nothing to do with a computer system automatically collecting data on what TV shows you're watching and the vendor reselling this information in aggregate from millions of users (or, just using it to allow some other vendor to automatically and impersonally select an ad to show you, along with millions of other users in the same algorithmic category). It's a false equivalency intended to manipulate your emotions into fearing a harm that does not exist. The reason they have to resort to this sort of technique is that they can't point to any actual harm from this practice that ordinary people would care about, so emotionally manipulative trickery is their only option.
- mschuster91 5y ago> These terms imply some kind of personal connection. The police will put a suspect under "surveillance". Someone might "spy" on their spouse to see if they're cheating. The thing is, with "dragnet warrants" (see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-warrants-reverse-search-warrants-police-google https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...) it is incredibly easy for your data to end up subpoena'd by the police. Secret services may not even need that and simply take all the data they want. And at that time, your TV, phone or other device has effectively become an espionage device. This is why the European GDPR focuses so hard on data minimization: data that doesn't even get collected or stored cannot be abused by criminals and the government.
- Zigurd 5y agoThis argument is a denial of the existence and effectiveness of microtargeting.
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- api 5y agoI realized a while back that a hidden factor behind the rise of the "you are the product" model could be inequality. There may not be enough purchasing power remaining in the middle class to sustain honest straightforward business models, causing businesses that mostly market to the middle class to look elsewhere. In particular they are looking at ways to get more money from corporations, wealthy individuals, and governments, all of whom are totally flush with cash. Thus we have surveillance capitalism, which is about marketing the customer as the product to the people who actually have money. I realized this as my own income has increased a bit in the last decade, and I'm finding myself perfectly willing to look up-market for products that among other things have stronger security and privacy guarantees. In many cases this means buying "business grade" networking gear, flat panel monitors as TVs, DIY home security surveillance (Blue Iris + business grade cams), etc., and all those things cost a lot more up front. Then I realized I was buying privacy, and that privacy is now a privilege for the upper middle class and above. The solution to surveillance capitalism may be recapitalization of the middle class more than any techno-fix or even specific regulation of surveillance practices. The latter I think will fail for the same reason that much of the GDPR is empty: the legislators do not understand the tech well enough, and there's too much surface area anyway and thus too many ways to work around the law.
- RNCTX 5y agoI'd say it's more likely that the adblock model will persist into other forms (proxies, anonymizers, etc), and you'll see a rehash of the early 2000s Tivo lawsuits in which someone like Vizio claims that it is unlawful to stop the camera on the TV from surveilling your living room.
- noptd 5y agoBut advertisers won't pay us nearly as much if we can't verify how many people in your household are actually viewing the ads! /s
- clairity 5y agoyes, that's a concrete instance of why increasing concentration of power and wealth is bad for society as a whole. now consider that there are millions of these little mechanisms working against social cohesion and our current malaise really comes into focus. as a result, i really think we should be tying fiscal, tax, and monetary policy to median income (and the like) rather than gdp (and the like). this would wholly combat the hollowing out of the middle class, rather than piecemeal policies that tend to be inadequate and circumvented.
- tyingq 5y agoMost people I know have either a Roku or an Amazon Fire connected to their TV. I assume Vizio's spying capability is nil if it's set up this way, with the TV wifi off. I wonder how common that sort of set up is.
- sgerenser 5y agoThat setup does eliminate Vizio’s spying ability, but my understanding is that Amazon and Roku do essentially the same thing. On Roku at least, you can turn on settings like “limit ad tracking” to mitigate this somewhat.
- city41 5y agoOr setup something like a pihole. My pihole has blocked my Roku from calling home over 20,000 times in the past 24 hours.
- mcrae 5y agoDon't believe that using an external device helps -- the TV can detect what content is being played by sampling the video stream and creating a fingerprint. They can compare to live tv streams to detect channels, and static video files to detect movies/tv shows -- even the menus and cutscenes in video games can be detected. Also note that disabling WiFi isn't always helpful - some devices expose ethernet over HDMI which the TV will use to phone home.
- SkyPuncher 5y agoWhen Shazam was popular, I believe they embedded digital fingerprints in the non-audible ranges of the audio stream. That allowed phone apps to quickly label content. I suspect a similar thing happens with video content.
- MAGZine 5y agotime for hdmi condoms, I guess.
- aulin 5y ago
- Zigurd 5y agoThat's why I use Chromecast. It's just enabling Google to "make the rubble bounce" in the ruins of my privacy.
- seized 5y agoI bought a Vizio TV knowing this... But it lives it's life without any internet access at all courtesy of my firewall. And this isn't limited to Vizio at all, a lot of new Samsung's have a higher price AND ads on it's home screen.
- inetknght 5y ago> it lives it's life without any internet access at all courtesy of my firewall TVs now and in the future come with cell radios too. No need to worry about a pesky customer's firewall getting in the way of profits!
- andrei_says_ 5y agoHow does one disable/block something like this? What legislation can we introduce to ensure that we own a device after paying for it? Where “ownership” also means disabling nonessential functionality of our choice?
- MerelyMortal 5y agoOpen it up and remove the card/chip.
- inetknght 5y agoThat's not feasible right now, and certainly not in the future.
- MerelyMortal 5y agoNot feasible for the average person, but it was very easy to do for my LG TV.
- netr0ute 5y ago> How does one disable/block something like this? Watch this video: https://youtu.be/urglg3WimHA https://youtu.be/urglg3WimHA
- dv_dt 5y agoSo are there any TV firmware hacking communities that help owners secure their TVs?
- stragies 5y agohttps://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io shows the code, that rootmy.tv uses to root some recent LG WebOS TVs.
- tata71 5y agoRussia and China
- grepfru_it 5y agoHey you reached out to me on a previous comment but your profile doesn’t have any contact info! Update your profile so I can contact you or feel free to hit me up by email!
- jml7c5 5y agoThis is likely incorrect. The $57.3 million is for the "Platform+" division. It includes profit from homescreen ads, selling of buttons on remotes, and cuts of streaming revenue. It's likely that only a small fraction of the division's $83 million in revenue comes from tracking and then selling viewing habits.
- inetknght 5y ago> It includes profit from homescreen ads, selling of buttons on remotes, and cuts of streaming revenue > It's likely that only a small fraction of the division's $83 million in revenue comes from tracking and then selling viewing habits. It's good to have an example of cognitive dissonance now and then.
- dlgeek 5y agoParent poster isn't demonstrating that? Selling of buttons on remotes absolutely does not involve 'tracking and then selling viewing habits'. The homescreen ads may or may not involve any tracking - I suspect they likely do not - they're billboards, and they involve showing ads to users but not tracking their viewing. (I have no information on how streaming revenue share is structured, so I won't assert anything about it. I can easily imagine it going either way).
- inetknght 5y ago> Selling of buttons on remotes absolutely does not involve 'tracking and then selling viewing habits'. Yes it certainly does. 1) sell button on remote 2) user presses button 3) sell information about button presses. > The homescreen ads may or may not involve any tracking - I suspect they likely do not - they're billboards, and they involve showing ads to users but not tracking their viewing. Oh yeah and the ads on your computer definitely are also only just like billboards. It's certainly not profitable at all to know who's watching what when selling advertisement space. It's certainly not capable at all of determining specific names/addresses just from an advertisement load. /s
- karxxm 5y agoWould a PiHole help here? If yes, again a good reason why every household should have such a DNS blocking device in their local network
- clairity 5y agoa (full-featured) firewall is much better, especially if it can consume popular blocklists. piholes can't deal with hard-coded IPs or an integrated dns server that bypasses the pihole.
- noptd 5y agoAny recommendations on this front? I've been dreading the day that I'll have to deal with apps ignoring the pihole and using their own DNS servers, especially via https or TLS.
- clairity 5y agoyes, google and the like reportedly already do this, so pihole bypassing is already here. i bought a pepwave surf soho[0] a few years back, largely because it had a few other features (multi-homing, multi-wlan, robust vlan'ing, etc.) that i wanted due to my peculiar circumstances. it has limited blocklist support however, but does allow manual blocklist curation of arbitrary length, including cidr-formatted IP ranges. the main downside of this router is that it's 100mbps (actually ~120mbps)[1], but that's a limit i come close to very rarely in my day-to-day. as with smart tv's, it's frustrating how few good router options there are. [0]: https://www.peplink.com/products/pepwave-surf-soho/ https://www.peplink.com/products/pepwave-surf-soho/ [1]: note that this is sustained throughput, the ports are 1gbps. most consumer routers struggle to reach even this sustained rate.
- znpy 5y agoThe same can be said for samsung -- https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/ https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/ This is where the iot, the metaverse and other tech buzzwords converge: advertising. I guess. EDIT: On the subject: I had to look very carefully, but I was able to buy a TV from OK (https://www.ok-online.com/en/#televisions https://www.ok-online.com/en/#televisions) with no software besides signal decoding. It's still got hdmi inputs so maybe i'll hook a smarter device in the future.
- LiquidPolymer 5y agoI'm curious if projectors collect the same info? We bought several BenQ projectors that have no internet connection. Of course the computer player or Blu-ray player we use with the projectors do have WiFi connections. For aesthetic reasons we removed the large flat screen TV's from our house. We now use projectors on walls with a skim coat and flat white texture. It blends right into our 1927 house. The projections are around 120 inches and look glorious. In the past week we watched John Ford's "The Searchers" and then "Avatar" in 3D. Both were amazing to see so big, bright, and beautiful. When we are done watching, the projector is put away and our home is not a constant display of gadgetry. When ever I go into a store that has a wall of TV's they seem to get worse and worse every year with saturation dialed ALL THE WAY and images looking more and more like CG with smoothing and other weird filters. Perhaps i'm just old.
- OJFord 5y agoI rarely shop in person so I can't really say if it's getting worse, but it's certainly always been my experience that other than in dedicated hi-fi/home cinema type shops they dial the settings to the ridiculous maximum and of course boast that it's 1200000000:1 dynamic 360 max HDR+ gen 5 or whatever.
- sgtnoodle 5y agoIt's usually called "dynamic" mode and it makes me sad when I see it turned on in peoples' homes.
- beaugunderson 5y agoHighly recommend rtings.com to get the best settings for any TV; they do a lot of work to get the most natural look.
- sgtnoodle 5y agoThat's cool. I did that when I lived alone in an apartment, and it was awesome. When I researched the best projector setup, I read that a gray wall may actually be better than white because it can result in darker blacks. I couldn't try it, though, as I was renting at the time. Have you ever experimented with that?
- wayoutthere 5y agoThis is why I don’t connect my TVs to WiFi. I have NVidia Shields and Chromecasts on all my TVs when I want to run apps. Sure, Google spies on me too, but they probably already know everything they would learn from what I watch.
- shmerl 5y agoSomeone actually trusts MS and Apple? Their reputation doesn't exactly instill any trust.
- yalogin 5y agoYep ever since the smart tv became a thing, every tv company is focusing on collecting and selling data. One thing I ever do is give Wi-Fi access to tvs. That is why when you sign up for comcast they give you a free set top box absolutely free on top of a free peacock subscription. There is money on the back end of that to be made.
- kevindong 5y agoI've had my Vizio TV (P55-F1, 2019 model; a mid range model) for about 2.5 years now. Image/sound quality is great. But the annoyances and overall mediocrity of the OS and its updates [0] made me just disconnect the TV from the internet and fully switch over to using an Apple TV for all consumption rather than using the native Vizio OS. [0]: The OS is terrible and the remote randomly stops working sometimes. Sometimes the TV would take tens of seconds to turn on, but then other times it was near instant. Every single update since I've gotten the TV seems to make the TV even slower/more laggy. There was even an update about two years back where the Youtube app's volume was inexplicably an order of magnitude lower than every other input's volume (e.g. a volume of 100/100 on the Youtube app ended up being equivalent to a volume of 10/100 for all other apps/inputs). It took Vizio 1-3 months to fix it. Unblockable ads on the home screen and genuinely multi-hundred millisecond response times on the app launcher infuriated me.
- dylan604 5y agoDoes Vizio actually make the YouTube app? Why is it Vizio's responsibility to fix? I can see YT prioritizing this app's dev time waaaaaay lower than other devices. If the stats don't justify it, no PM at a FAANG is going to let their team work it.
- emodendroket 5y agoWhy does every television need a propietary system with custom apps?
- dylan604 5y agoWhy does your phone need a proprietary system with custom apps? Not really sure what you're trying to get at though.
- emodendroket 5y agoWell, good point. That’s why most manufacturers go with Android instead of making their own.
- bradgranath 5y agohttps://investors.vizio.com/news/news-details/2021/VIZIO-HOLDING-CORP.-Reports-Q3-2021-Financial-Results/default.aspx https://investors.vizio.com/news/news-details/2021/VIZIO-HOL... Here it direct from the VIZIO CEO William Wang in an address to shareholders.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoRTings, a site that reviews (amongst other things) televisions, maintains a list of fully ad-free models: https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv (They are the ones with "10" in the ad-free column) The dominant brand for ad-free models is in fact... Vizio.
- dbpatterson 5y agoAd-free doesn't necessarily mean they aren't tracking you, right? Viewership info is _still_ valuable, even if it's not being used right on the device.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoYes I suppose that's true. Tracking can at least be defeated by simply not connecting to the internet. Some TVs with ads actually have ads pre-loaded on them, so not connecting them isn't sufficient to defeat the ads.
- codezero 5y agoThis is until they start using 5G or LoRa to make a mesh to get around that.
- thantik 5y agoAmazon's Smarthome stuff offers basically a bluetooth side-channel specifically for this purpose. It's called "Amazon Sidewalk", and they are already using it for Tile trackers, Ring Doorbell stuff (the doorbell even acts as a mesh point for this in some models)
- codezero 5y agoYep, eventually this technology will be worthwhile for folks with less scale to implement. Maybe Amazon will license access to Sidewalk. I believe Apple does a similar thing with their devices.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gennarro 5y agoI’d highly recommend a dumb tv. From a previous HN link: https://helpatmyhome.com/best-non-smart-tv/ https://helpatmyhome.com/best-non-smart-tv/
- LegitShady 5y agoJust so people don't get confused from your link - all the insignia TVs without 'smart' features are 1080p. Every insignia panel I see at bestbuy with 4k resolution is a 'fire tv edition'. You can't get a modern dumb tv with a good panel from them.
- gennarro 5y agoGood clarification. Thanks!
- chadlavi 5y agoThis is why smart tvs are cheap. Is that not common knowledge?
- someonewhocar3s 5y agoAverage Revenue Per User (ARPU) grew 91% to $19.89 given 'it's just software' this is very significant for the bottom line, basically the value of 'quality' speakers or something like that (may be more than the entire remote) Not sure what they make per TV. Could be 0 in this model.
- civilized 5y agoAfter the 9274821th article about yet another company hoovering up data about me to help someone run personalized ads, I am less frightened about the privacy implications than morbidly curious at the mammoth, grotesque waste of it all. I have to ask: how much of the American economy is now based on showing people ads? Is there no limit to how much money and time and effort civilization can sink into this? Even if ads could control me like a puppet and direct me to make purchases at any time, would the proceeds from that pay for the effort?
- teeray 5y agoEven if I do get a good targeted ad, I’m usually like “oh yeah, I bought that months ago” or “this would have been a good ad for me three years ago at ${PREVIOUS_JOB} where we actually used this service.” The targeting works, but the timing is abysmal and fails to introduce new products into my thought space at the time I’m making those decisions. In other words, they fail at their raison d'être
- AussieWog93 5y agoThat's not true in the general case and I'm sure you could think of many counterexamples for this.
- tim333 5y agoI'm told facebook is quite good at getting the timing right. My friend used to sell fancy holidays via facebook ads and they seemed pretty good at figuring when the customers were thinking of booking a holiday. I feel a bit disconnected from the whole ads scene as my ad blockers are so good I really have little idea of what I'm missing! One of my problems with the holiday ads is they tend to push expensive hols with profit margin to spend on facebook ads whereas I tend to book the value for money stuff.
- bjackman 5y agoI've recently ordered this book which I believe deals with the topic of your question: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651/subprimeattentioncrisis https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651/subprimeattenti... Haven't read it yet, looking forwards to it!
- rendall 5y ago> In other words, they spy on you because they can get away with it, because the state permits them. We don't have a federal privacy law with a private right of action, we don't have statutory limits on terms of service. Even where you do have some rights, we let companies take them away with "binding arbitration" waivers that confiscate your right to sue them and join class actions. My fellow Americans, I am an expatriate who lives in the EU, and so I come under GDPR protections. It gives me quite some piece of mind to live where the State is thinking about and acting on these issues, even if imperfectly. You, too, could have that piece of mind. There is a clear road from this rather dystopian reality, where a company can use and abuse your data at will, to solid protections with teeth. The first step is to believe it's possible and desirable.
- MandieD 5y agoIn similar shoes to yours - there has got to be a way we American techies living in the EU can make the most of GDPR for the sake of the folks back home.
- Ozzie_osman 5y ago> The idea that there is virtue in paying because it incentivizes better corporate ethics is absurd on its face. This swings too far. Yes, you can for a product and still be a product. Selling a product doesn't necessarily incentivized good privacy behavior. But using ads _almost definitely_ incentives poor privacy behavior. So you just have to be careful, but on the net paid products are probably more aligned with privacy
- rileymat2 5y ago"As Richard Lawler writes for The Verge, the division that handles ads and surveillance booked $57.3 million in profits, while the hardware division's profits were $25.6 million." I am curious how the accounting works on this, they could not make any profit on the surveillance without selling the TV's, but none of the TV cost is recorded as an expense for the surveillance numbers.
- z3t4 5y agoI'm looking forward to the day where I can get a 80 inch smart-tv for free because it's financed with ads and in app purchases. Then I will disable the ads and use it as a dumb-tv behind my receiver.
- danparsonson 5y ago> Then I will disable the ads... No you won't, because there will be no switch for that and it will include a 5G chip and therefore connect itself to the internet whether or not you want it to. Can't get online for 30 days? Sorry, you violated the TOS that you agreed to without reading and now your free TV will only play nyan cat on a loop.
- YeBanKo 5y agoThis is painfully reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode “ Fifteen Million Merits”, in which at one moment the main character has to watch odious ad, be he does not have enough “money” to skip it. Ubiquitous 5G, xfinity public access points, Amazon Echo networks will make it absolutely possible.
- squarefoot 5y agoApparently being sued years ago didn't teach them anything. https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/06/vizio-settles-for-2-2-million-in-ftc-suit-over-snooping-on-consumers-viewing-habits/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/06/vizio-settles-for-2-2-mill... They also violated the GPL in their products. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
- userbinator 5y agoI wonder how much demand there would be for a service that "dumbs" a smart TV by replacing its main board with a "universal" one that still has media capabilities, but no other intrusiveness: http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgreen.org/2019/01/obzor-universalnogo-skalera-s-dvb-t2-ds-d3663lua http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre...
- thefounder 5y agoYou can just plug in an apple tv. Problem solved
- lotsofpulp 5y agoInteracting with a TV menu seems so alien to me. They all come with HDMI CEC, you never need to touch the TV remote. Apple TV, the IPTV boxes that pirate channels, Chome sticks and fire sticks, even cable and satellite set top boxes. It makes almost no difference to anyone unless TV manufacturers start popping up ads randomly while you are watching tv.
- mrlatinos 5y agoVizio tracks set top devices like the Apple TV as well. They do this through Inscape.tv - which basically tracks a pixel in the corner to fingerprint what you are watching, they record this real time along with your location, wifi info, etc. and create advertising audiences or sell the data in "anonymized" form. This is always running whether you're using an app, watching antenna TV, or using a third party device. The only way to prevent it is DNS blocking with something like the pihole. And that's if they allow you to change the DNS lookup address.
- thefounder 5y agoWhy would you connect the TV to the internet if you have Apple TV? Vizio can't send any data if it's not connected to the internet.
- whynotmaybe 5y ago
- wcfields 5y agoI work in the advertising industry (media buy side) and we buy the feed from VideoAmp (Vizio) to determine linear TV spot reach better than Nielsen. We only buy for our clients and get a feed of only their placements, but essentially VideoAmp knows how many Vizio TV’s are online in every zip code and from that can with a fairly high confidence interval give a statistical accurate determination of what played on TV. Most media includes ACR (auto content recognition) fingerprints for this purpose, either through VideoAmp or Comscore (comcast set top boxes). The whole game for them is for you to get your “Smart TV” online and they entice with apps and now tons of shovelware-esq free TV channels like PlutoTV.
- educaysean 5y agoThis was a fun reading with useful information, but I'm not at all impressed by the "capitalism is the root problem" tone behind the article. Yes, our society could do a better job with educating the public in terms of their privacy options, but capitalism isn't a system that rewards greed above all else. It's a system that transparently reflects the motivation of our population at large. You can scoff at all these companies today that are going carbon neutral as just "following the money" or whatever, but that's the entire point of capitalism. If something matters to most of us deeply, then we'll vote with our wallets. Eg. If most of us were so sick of how our mobile phones are apying on us, companies like Purism would be raking in billions. The truth is that most of us would rather have fancy cameras with fun case options. Capitalism isn't forcing our hands, we are the ones making choices - capitalism just reflects it.
- 2ion 5y agoGet a 30" monitor and a multimedia PC like a thinkcentre, nuc, dell micro whatever and absolve yourself of the garbage that is present-day consumer electronics.
- spinchange 5y agoTimeout, did anyone consider that services would indeed naturally be more profitable, on net, than making and selling hardware? Look at gross revenues: most of the company's SALES are from selling TVs!
- YeBanKo 5y agoYears ago I had an opportunity to work at a company, that would do just that - help TV manufacturers and advertisers figure out what you are watching on your Smart TV. I passed on that opportunity, I wish I could say because of my high morals, but alas it’s because something better came along. I did a little bit of digging and discovered that before this advanced tech, the main player in getting this kind of data was Nielsen. They’d install a device in your home to collect such data. It seemed ridiculous to me that someone would agree to install a device with a sole purpose of feeding data to 3rd party. Some time later I received a survey from Nielsen with few bucks attached asking to complete a survey. First, I dismissed it, then after a second thought I actually completed with real info(it was anonymized). At that time privacy awareness was picking up and I realized that their approach was far more honest, as participants weren’t implicitly opted in, but made their choice to participate.