When you watch your Smart TV, it could also be watching you.
A report this month from Julia Angwin at ProPublica reveals that Vizio, a top television maker, automatically tracks the viewing habits of Smart TV owners and shares that information with advertisers in a way that could connect those preferences to what those customers do on their phones or other mobile devices.
Vizio’s “Smart Interactivity Program” is turned on by default for its 10 million Smart TV customers, ProPublica reported, and works like this:
The company analyzes snippets of what you watch, be it on Netflix or traditional television, and connects patterns in your viewing behavior with your Internet Protocol address — an online identifier that can be used to pinpoint every device connected from your home. That includes everything from your laptop and phone to your smart thermostat. That information is then shared with Vizio’s partners, who in turn could use that data to help to target advertisements.
In an e-mailed response to a Washington Post inquiry, a Vizio spokesperson said the company’s data-mining programs are part of a “revolutionary shift across all screens that brings measurability, relevancy and personalization to the consumer like never before.”
Vizio said it shares “aggregate, anonymized data” with media and data companies so they can “make better-informed decisions” about content and advertising strategies.
The spokesperson did not dispute the underlying facts in ProPublica’s report but said the company thinks the article “reflects a filtered opinion of our recently updated Vizio Privacy Policy.”
The company’s privacy policy says it will share viewing data “together with the IP address associated with the corresponding Vizio television” with third-party partners.
“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. The company “imposes strict conditions of confidentiality” when sharing IP addresses with third parties, according to the policy.
There are laws that limit how companies share information about video watching habits, including the Video Privacy Protection Act.
However, Vizio says those laws do not apply to its tracking service because the company associates IP addresses with the data rather than a person’s name or other “personally identifiable information.”
It’s true that some U.S. courts have held that IP addresses do not constitute personally identifiable information. But privacy regulators in the European Union disagree. Also, IP addresses are increasingly used by data brokers to paint detailed portraits of who people are.
Vizio isn’t the first television maker to face scrutiny over the privacy of Smart TV technology. This year, Samsung appeared in a flurry of headlines about eavesdropping televisions and changed its privacy policy over a section that seemed to imply it was constantly listening in and sending data off to a third party.
