Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label fined

Vizio fined $2.2 million by the FTC for secretly collecting and selling owner information

Vizio did everything wrong when it comes to data collection. Vizio has been fined $2.2 million by  the Federal Trade Commission  for "surreptitiously collecting details on viewers' watching habits." The company also agreed to delete all the data collected before March 1, 2016, and to get specific consent from users with a new privacy program. Vizio's Smart Interactivity technology isn't much different from what other smart TV manufacturers use to find out exactly what you watch and when you watch it. The difference, according to  ProPublica , stems from the way Vizio went about collecting it and what they did with it afterward. For starters, Smart Interactivity is active and running unless you specifically opt out, and you're not told it's there or that opting out is even possible. Oddly enough, the instructions to tell you  how  to opt out have disappeared from Vizio's support site and have been replaced by a 404 error page. Thankfully,  Vizio no