If You Have a Vizio TV, It’s Watching You Too

If you have a Vizio TV, it might be watching your every move-and selling those moves to advertisers so they can target you more efficiently by analyzing your behavior.

Samsung and fellow Vizio rival LG Electronics have similar programs that track Smart TV customers’ viewing habits, but only if customers turn on the feature, according to ProPublica. Vizio says it shares “non personal identifiable information” with partners for targeted content and advertising.

It’s turned on by default, but you can turn it off if you don’t want to share that information.

Vizio’s data sales aren’t yet a significant source of revenue for the TV hardware company, according to its IPO filing, but a hardware company exercising the loophole to collect TV analytics the programming providers can’t could be a major boon for the industry.

As a result, there are no VIZIO D58U-D3 58-inch 4K TV reviews that we can bring you yet unfortunately but we do have a full heads-up on what you will be getting.

With the advent of Smart TVs, companies have become more knowledgeable about their consumers than ever before. Specifically, Vizio monitors video streams, whether you are watching Netflix or traditional cable.

The new policy delves into the company’s “Smart Interactivity”, or a feature on its TVs that “recognizes onscreen content and may in the future permit you to interact with this content”, the policy stated. “These third parties may combine this information with other information about devices associated with that IP address, in order to customize the advertisements displayed on those other devices”, it says. This data is supposed to be anonymized, but ProPublica notes that it’s increasingly possible to link IP addresses to individuals, and Vizio’s policy doesn’t mention encryption for the IP address. Show-stopping security flaws can be used to shut cars off while driving, and even companies like Nvidia are planning to require an email address registration for future GeForce drivers. This time around, the company in question is no other than Vizio, one of the most well-known in the market.

Adding Internet capability and advanced processing features, in other words, doesn’t turn the TV into a new multimedia hub with awesome new functionality. Not long ago, the company got in trouble in Belgium, where a judge ordered it to stop collecting such information about Belgium users without their consent.

A spokeswoman for Tapad, a company that helps identify users across their many devices, said that its contracts prevent it from sharing the name of the companies it works with.

Costco has deals for Vizio Ultra HD 4K Smart TV’s as well, but Sam’s Club’s Black Friday deals are better.