Comment by c420
8 days ago
"The TVs “are effectively Chinese-sponsored surveillance devices, recording the viewing habits of Texans at every turn without their knowledge or consent,” the lawsuits said."
This explains why Vizio, who is owned by Walmart, was not sued.
Sony, Samsung, and LG are not Chinese companies but they are being sued. It's more likely that Vizio is not included because they already got hit by the FTC (but not hard enough to disable ACR).
From what I understood, ACR on Vizio TVs was disabled, but is available as an opt-in "feature". I don't know what sort of person would opt-in...
[flagged]
It's also excellent pro-privacy advocacy. I am happy to have a big tent for this issue.
7 replies →
So.. if it was American companies doing the spying it would be a different story?
Not according to the law. Speeches are not the law.
Yeah pretty much. No regulators are batting an eye at the industrial data gathering schemes of Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. and they never have. And the only major social network under real legal scrutiny is TikTok.
The American Government wants to have the cake and eat it too, as per usual. They want to leave the massive column of the economy that is surveillance capitalism intact and operating, and making them money, and they want to make sure those scary communists can't do the same. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to take down one without taking down the other, unless you legally enshrine that only American corporations have a right to spy on Americans. And (at time of comment anyway) they seem to not want to openly say the reason is just naked nationalism/racism.
Doesn't the $2 million fine paid by Walmart just make this a cost of doing business? Doesn't seem enough to be a deterrent.
That fine was levied years before Walmart acquired Vizio.
And of course: casual reminder that Vizio does extensive ACR and ad targeting, and even bought a company doing it to facilitate that:
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
But I'm sure Texans are fully aware and consented to this, right?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizio