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.