US TV manufacturer Vizio’s underhanded Big Data dealing may have just cost it $2.2 million but I think it is something we can unfortunately expect to see a lot more of.
The FTC this week announced that viewing data of individual households was monitored through a built-in spy device which used image recognition technology. Once every second, software in the Vizio TVs would read pixel data from a segment of the screen. This was sent home and compared against a database of film, television and advertising content to determine what was being watched.
The FTC has revealed that Vizio went further than this – matching data on what was being watched with IP addresses, and selling it, along with third party demographic data, to businesses and organizations with a need for audience measurement.
This week we heard that Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle the FTC complaint, agreed to stop collecting viewing data in this way, and to delete the data it had already collected from its servers. That might seem like a comparatively low figure, but this may be, as Vizio point out in their statement, because personally identifiable information wasn’t transmitted.
This isn’t the first time our smart home entertainment systems have been accused of spying on us. In 2013 LG admitted that voice data was still being captured and transmitted even if users had denied consent for this to happen. And in 2015 there was concern after it was found that Samsung TVs were also recording and sending home “living room chatter”.
Interestingly, and acknowledging that this is likely to be a problem which only becomes more frequent in the future, the FTC put out some suggestions for manufacturers of smart home equipment, to help them steer clear of causing this sort of trouble.
They were:
- Explain your data collection processes up front
- Get consumer’s consent before you collect and share highly specific information about their preferences
- Make it easy for customers to exercise options
- Established consumer protection principles apply to new technology.
It is the first and second of these principles where Vizio most spectacularly fell short. Their (clearly ineffective) means of gaining “consent” was through an option presented to the user as “Smart Interactivity”. Customers were informed that leaving this option switch on (its default setting) meant their personal data would be monitored for the vague and undefined purpose of “enables program offers and suggestions.”
As people tend to do these days, many of Vizio’s customers were likely to switch this on, thinking it would offer them some form of convenience. However it seems there was no functionality built into the system to enable it to offer suggestions.
And it’s a reminder to ourselves as consumers that increasingly we have to make sure we know what we are signing up for, and that we are not falling for marketing spiel and buzzwords, when we give computers permission to delve into our personal data. In other words our data is hugely valuable and if a business doesn’t make a very strong case as to why we should hand it over, we probably shouldn’t.
While this unauthorized data collection isn’t new, this is the first case that has come to light of image recognition technology being used in this way. More common is audio analytics – which as well as the smart TV manufacturers mentioned previously, is also used by the UK’s Broadcaster Audience Research Board, with express user permission, to provide official TV viewing statistics.
Visual data is much richer. Vizio’s spying eyes were confined to its customer’s screens, as it sampled the data directly at the source, rather than relying on a camera or microphone to tell what people were watching. But with advances being made in fields of machine learning and image processing, computers are increasingly able to “see” using cameras, and recognize what it is that they are seeing. With the ever-increasing number of cameras and sensors filling the world, it’s likely that huge new markets will open up for this unstructured but highly valuable data. And this means there are going to be plenty of people looking to make a quick buck by supplying it.
