re: So I scan the free section on craiglist from time to time

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According to FTC, the smart TV maker installed data tracking software to collect viewing habits of 11 million of its smart TVs without informing its customers or seeking their consent.

Besides this, the company also collected each household's IP address, nearby access points, and zip code, and shared that information with other third-party companies, who used it for targeting advertising towards Vizio TV owners.

The data tracking software reportedly worked by collecting a selection of on-screen pixels every second your TV was on, and then compared that data to a database of known movies, television shows, and commercial commercials, and another type of video content. This practice is known as automatic content recognition (ACR).


According to the FTC, Vizio also recorded the date, time, channel of TV shows, and whether you watched the program live or recorded and took all that information and connected it to your IP address.

With this data in hand, anyone can know you and your television watching habits, and according to the FTC, "Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers' viewing histories to advertisers and others."

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