Study Claims Vizio Simply Ignores 'Smart' TV Spying Opt Out Requests
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly "off." Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG's response? To deny everything. [...] That latter point is central to a new study out of…
A recent study conducted by Northeastern University examined the behavior of smart TVs regarding their "opt-out" feature for automatic content recognition (ACR). The researchers executed 5,943 experiments across twelve different smart TV models.
The study found that most smart TVs employ ACR technology, which captures audio or video snippets of viewed content and monetizes that data to create personalized viewer profiles. However, the opt-out feature is often ineffective. According to the findings, the advertised ACR opt-out was successful on only four operating systems.
On Samsung Tizen devices, content correlated endpoints hosted on Amazon Kinesis continued to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios. On Vizio SmartCast, the opt-out option did not function for 100% of tested scenarios, suggesting that Vizio simply disregarded user requests.
The researchers highlighted the lack of transparency regarding the extent of data collected due to encryption. Therefore, they could not confirm whether Vizio's actions violated its Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement. The study also revealed that Roku ignores opt-out requests when users are watching their own channels. Additionally, none of the smart TV manufacturers track Netflix viewing to avoid potential conflicts with the streaming giant's agreements.
Samsung's opt-out function was more likely to work when users were watching antenna broadcasts. On two smart TV platforms, personal viewing data remained unencrypted, despite previous scandals and legal troubles related to ACR. Furthermore, VIDAA OS, commonly found on Hisense and Toshiba smart TVs, transmits ACR data to servers run by Unruly over MQTT without encryption.
This allows any entity on the network path between the TV and the servers to intercept the data, including a permanent identifier for the TV, the time zone, app name, input type, antenna channel, and audio fingerprint.
Written by urgent.news from Slashdot's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
