It all started from a simple attempt to listen to music:
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I tried to connect to a Vizio soundbar.
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I downloaded the wrong app.
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Then a fake one.
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Then the real one “VIZIO Mobile", which asked me to sign in through none other than Walmart.
That’s when things got weird.
I know for a fact at no point a consumer thought:
“You know what would really improve this TV and speaker setup? Logging in with a retail account.”
This isn’t a glitch. It’s not bad design. It is the design.
Vizio used to just make decent, affordable TVs and soundbars, pretty solid home entertainment setups. Except, quietly, that wasn’t all they were doing. I found that their devices have long used something called Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, which tracks what you’re watching across streaming, cable, even gaming. Not in a dramatic, sci-fi way. Just consistently, in the background, consuming aggregated data.
This prompted me to look up Vizio’s past which led me discovering that, wow what a surprise, back in 2017, Vizio got hit by the Federal Trade Commission and New Jersey (yes, the state) for how it was collecting user data.
They had ACR turned on, continuously tracked what people watched across streaming, cable, DVDs, and even over-the-air TV allowing content-recognition frame-by-frame.
“VIZIO’s smart TVs had been transmitting certain pixel information via the TV’s internet connection. When this information was compared with a database of television and movie content, VIZIO was able to assemble a consumer’s second-by-second viewing history.” —Vorys in 2017
...and because apparently “transmitting pixel information” is supposed to sound normal, let’s just make this clear:
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Your TV was capturing what was on the screen
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Sending that data over the internet
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Matching it against a database
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Reconstructing exactly what you were watching, second by second
So not:
“This household watches Netflix sometimes”
But:
“This household watched this exact show, at this exact time, for this exact duration”
It wasn’t “vague analytics”… It was granular and second-by-second tracking that was collected through the TV itself, which was then tied to other data like demographics and households.