This TV company was spying on you until it was called out

Electronics company Vizio doesn't want its customers to believe it ran a giant spying operation, but the company's surrender to a recent lawsuit suggests otherwise.

Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million on Monday to settle a lawsuit brought against them by the New Jersey government and the Federal Trade Commission. In doing so, they agreed to stop fighting the charge that the company "installed software on its TVs to collect viewing data on 11 million consumer TVs without consumers’ knowledge or consent."

Vizio and "an affiliated company" built their smart TVs to spy on whatever their customers were watching, starting in Febuary, 2014, according to the complaint filed. They did this with a pixel-reading technology that matched pixels on customer TVs to pixels of whatever show was in their database — live shows, shows recorded for future watching, movies, whatever.  Read more...