On the individual level, probably not much. But I think you could help much more on a societal level. Help monitor what these devices are sending back when they contact their servers and report on it. Is there a database for that sort of thing?

But also, giving to litigation groups that fight this sort of thing. EFF comes to mind, but I'm sure there are others.

Giving to the EFF is a great idea, thanks.

Isn't there money to be made in simply selling honest software and hardware that doesn't spy? A profitable consumer electronics and software company could be established whose products didn't monitor, aggregate, or stalk its customers with ads.

I should think there's enough awareness of these kinds of antics in the market now that a successful company could be established soon that has the creation of honest, respectful tech as its M.O. A venture like that could be profitable AND disruptive.

I suppose to guarantee the privacy of its customers, such a company would necessarily have to have vast product offerings - or lots of like-minded partners - to compose a comprehensive landscape of services that could replace the privacy-violating services their consumers currently rely on. A sort of privacy walled-garden.

Build a blacklist of companies that adopt such policies and boycott the shit out of them.

The problem is virtually every company is on the list for one reason or another. Sony's rootkit for example.

As TheGRS notes, I'm worried that my individual contribution would be nothing. But I guess that's why we have organizations like the EFF.

The first company in the list should be Google.

So....stop buying everything?

I think you're definitely on to something.

"orders of magnitude more" ? As in, ~$200m? No chance.

With a little bit of industry knowledge, I would posit that they made roughly the same quantum as the fine.

So basically, it pays to engage in unethical behavior, because if you do get caught, the fine will usually not be more than the profit you made from said behavior.

Obviously. Whatsapp broke privacy law in Canada and across Europe to hack growth. Different industry, but Four Loko also was penalized for its risky (but great for some people) original formula.

> Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content.

That type of technology alone would cost you at least $2M to build.

So either your statement is incorrect or Vizio got a terrible ROI on this (sans fine).

I doubt it would cost nearly that much. I could build something similar in a couple of days, and I'm not even a developer by trade.

Just use something like pHash (e.g. https://github.com/JohannesBuchner/imagehash), screen cap the centre of the screen (say, a quarter of the screen in total) every minute, hash and then send the 8 byte hex string back to home base.

Ah, the "I'm no developer, but this is easy" person. Glad to have your valuable input here :)

"I could build a twitter clone over the weekend!"

The problem you are describing is one that many large companies spend huge resources on today, so guarantee you that it is not something you do in a couple of days.

Even if you had the system up and running, you would still need to create a large database system managing 100 billion data points each day and integrate the stream of information with your customers APIs.

$2m worth of developer time going into this project is very likely. Thinking you could do this in a couple of days is simply ignorant.

Ok. Now get the database of content to match it against and build a program that automatically determines what the user is engaged in.

Ok, I'll just go and buy a major media content publisher. Sony, perhaps...

Can you elaborate on your industry knowledge? I'm not in the industry so I'm curious. I would guess that Vizio would have been able to demand a premium for that data.

An order of magnitude would be ~$20m (actually ~$50m, together with the other fine). And I too believe that the fines were too small

Correct, and "orders" (plural) of magnitude would be ~$200m

No way. They absolutely made more than 2.2M. The content detection system, recv servers, writing the firmware, all cost more than 2.2M.

> What can an average citizen do (short of living Ron Swanson-style in a cabin in the woods) to protect their privacy?

Talk to your politicians. Tell them that data privacy is important. If you're in the USA lobby for something like the EU's Data Protection law (even at the constitutional level). If you're in EU, lobby for stronger data protection (no more sharing data with the USA)

When the penalty is less than the profit, it has a different name. Tax.