In response to some of the other comments here, basically what they are guilty of isn't spying but failing to properly disclose and opt-in users. There is a particular major AV vendor who is selling raw clickstream data of millions of their user's internet usage directly to marketers and other parties right now. As far as I can tell, as long as it is buried somewhere in the terms and conditions no one cares.
Of course, other companies that are actually serving the content are doing far more than just passively monitoring your viewing habits.
From my best guess, Facebook is logging every signal it can from content/pictures/videos it displays to users. Even if you didn't click like, comment, or click through the link it knows the story captured your attention.
I had an interesting case with Instagram where after viewing enough pictures of women's butts it started also showing men's bare butts in my feed too.. at least until I never opened any of them, and they disappeared.
Users should consider that content providers are going to have extremely deep data sets of even the most minute dimensions of their political leanings, porn viewing habits, dating preferences, and gullibilities. All of this will make what TV shows you watched between Netflix and NBC beyond mundane.
With an open web, where we get content from the source, this shouldn't actually be possible. Thank the platform business model.
Of particular concern are "shadow profiles" - dossiers on people who have never even used or consented to using Facebook[1]. I'm no lawyer, but there could be precedent per this Vizio case.
In my opinion Facebook is hugely overstepping people's privacy bounds, even if they do bury what they do with some of the data in their terms of service. I never even knew about DeepFace, or mouse cursor movements, or any of the multitudes of violations of privacy outlined in the article below, and frankly it scares me and makes me angry.
I certainly never read or even saw any warning about facial matching in all my photos or my children's photos.
Besides all that, people with shadow profiles who never even used Facebook or agreed to their TOS are being tracked. This is not ok.
I feel like there is a double standard here: we are vilifying Vizio - a company that has mutliple competitors - for much less wrongdoing than what Facebook is guilty of, even though FB has a de facto monopoly on social networking.
Edit: there is a link on the ftc.gov website where you can file a complaint against a company with concerns how it handles your privacy: https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/Company#crnt
Burn it all. Facebook and Vizio.
I think you misread the comment. These are people that already don't use Facebook.
ugh. Name them please! If it's in the ToS they shouldn't mind being called out.
Here are the terms, it's in section 8.Privacy, processing of personal information. https://www.avast.com/eula-avast-free-products
However "AVAST may publish or share such information with third parties that are not part of the AVAST Group but will only ever do so after removing personally identifiable information."
"Jumpshot also captures https clickstream data to reveal in-depth buying and social behavior above and beyond simple browsing."
Capturing https clickstream data is only possible when you MITM the user - see Avast.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vjj51/i_am_one_of_th...
At least, not all extension developers gave in to $$$.
no such thing.
This truly is technology run amok. "Welcome to buttstagram, for your butt viewing pleasure."
When I think about this situation it makes me want to stay entirely away from social media and off the internet. Yet it's ubiquity in our lives makes it difficult to be integrated and participant in society without the technology. And a lot of the features really do disappear when you remain entirely anonymous (via tor, incognito, not having accounts etc).
(Those in the dark search for cloud2butt browser plugin)
Or: Yet the ubiquity in our lives of Stuff that was never built for us (pretty sure I never gave the billionaires at FB and Goog as much as a single dollar), but merely to lure us, makes it difficult to be integrated with and unwittingly enabling that Stuff without installing and using that Stuff.
Later that day when we are back at home, she showed me an ad about that same restaurant. We never searched for something similar (this is a vegan restaurant), but only talked about it on our way home.
Still creepy.
What?
How is it going to connect to your neighbours wifi? How is someone driving past going to connect to your TV? Is the TV going to set itself up as an access point?
I'm completely behind not connecting random devices in my house to the internet but suggesting they are somehow trying to get data out by connecting to random networks or will just broadcast it for anyone to hear is a bit much.
We already see this with things like ultrasonic communication. A compromised (has sketchy app installed) phone could, for example, communicate with your television or computer speakers and mic via ultrasonic frequencies to determine what ads you have seen, or what digital streaming content you are consuming.
An app could take it even a step further and use a root exploit and secretly take a short recording every 10 minutes or so to relay to someone who wants to know what song or movie you were consuming.
This isn't just possible, things like this have already been found in the wild.
And you can bet your bottom dollar these snaky companies would keep their mouths shut under a NSL if it meant they could keep tracking you.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/ads_surreptit...
Frak it, TV is going in a Faraday cage
In the UK nearly everywhere send to have a BT WiFi signal as they give out routers with a commercial side-channel that anyone can pay to access. If your smart device had access to BT WiFi they'd get a signal out in many places regardless of whether the TV owner had WiFi.
/EvilGenius
Also lookup smart water meters, that can be read by driving by.
TBH, that's for too deep for my moral calculus. The only things I view/pirate from Netflix are Netflix original series and PBS documentaries/educational programs. I'm paying the former directly and the latter isn't really out to maximize profit but to enlighten and educate and it's somewhat supported by my tax dollars.
(Of course, the royalty is different for every piece of content, but the amount is negotiated ahead of time; it is not on a per-usage basis.)
This is different from iTunes movies, Amazon (non-Prime) Video, Vudu, Google Play, etc., which license on a revenue share basis.
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062515/how-ne...
So his strategy does increase royalty payments, but doesn't "vote" for who should receive those royalties.
Those deals probably include some combination of up-front payment as well as per-view payment.
Whhen I do use Netflix it's through my PS4.
Instagram was purely chronological until mid way through last year. And it only shows you content you've subscribed to. So it's possible an account you were following changed its posting habits.
The difference between what we worked on and what Cognitive/Inscape eventually did and got dinged for was that we were using this technology to build sync to broadcast apps not for tracking viewing and usage habits. The work we did never got to large scale deployments and we honestly forgot a bit about it. I knew what Inscape was doing - nothing secret just kind of in the industry weeds - post Vizio sale but honestly didn't think that much about it until now.
The majority of the population and the majority of developers seem to not care at all about intimately targeted ads.
At my current job, I don't have any privacy-related issues, but I have to handle occasional clueless ideas from the customer. It usually goes like this:
They: We want to have this security-related change X.
Me: Uh ok... but are you sure it's a good idea? What's your threat model?
They: ???
Me: You see, this change will make it more difficult for user to do Y, with no real
benefit to security, because A, B and C.
They: Uh... yes, you're right; let's not do it then.
-.-
Still, how did this article come about? What is a whistle blower?
How do you really know LG stopped their data collection? Sure they might have made a checkbox be switched off by default, but what does that say about the underlying software? IMO, nothing. It might have been a PR damage control campaign without an actual change.
There were multiple ACR Vendors doing the same thing (Gracenote, Samba TV are two at top of my head, there were many failed vendors in this space)
Google ACR on TVs and you'll find all the info you need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition
https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/04/cognitive-networks-ces/
(BTW the app in that techcrunch article is the one we worked on)
We all know people lie on the internet sometimes. We can't explicitly bring up the possibility everytime someone makes any statement, or half the internet would be "careful, this might not be true!".
What I want to know is, how did Vizio get caught? Was there a whistle blower. This article doesn't mention (unless I just missed it) how the FTC discovered this.
It might not help, of course.
Moreover, without vote visibility you can't tell if the reason given by one person is supported by others.
I understand that often often times people will use downvotes as a substitute for disagreeing, despite that being explicitly against its true function. Ultimately, you're complaining about fictitious karma points.
If you are a regular contributor who follows the rules, over time your karma will accrue and this can be a fuzzy way to weigh your importance to the community. The danger of valuing karma too much will cause the system to be gamed by marketers and astroturfers (see Reddit for Example A)
Early on with HN pg stated that downvoting for disagreement was proper behaviour on HN. My opinion is that's wrong but, in contrast to other fora, downvoting to disagree is thus explicitly a part of proper behaviour here.
That said, I don't care about the points, it's a matter of social value - if you don't know why people are disagreeing then you can't address that concern or reassess your own position, the downvoted adds no value whilst a comment may.
* Not the opinion of my (former) employer.
As another poster here asked: were there any ethical discussions in the organization?
Not sure what I can answer but for years my company worked on an Automatic Content Recognition project using tools from a team called Cognitive Networks who were bought by Vizio and makes up the tech that did this. If I understand correctly the founder of Vizio kept this tech for himself in the sale of Vizio.
When developing this we would work directly with Cognitive checking sync'd apps. We knew for a long time that they could see our content in their office while we tested.
Note LG got caught on this about 2-3 years ago and made ACR apps opt-in which pretty much killed it for LG.
AFAIK Samsung never did the exact same thing a bunch of providers saw the writing on the wall and dumped this sort of technology a few years back. It had some really cool applications for interactive sync to broadcast apps but the privacy concerns killed it for a lot for a lot of manufacturers.