I hate to get all paranoid, but it seems like every day there's news of a company's data being hacked, and what information isn't being hacked is being actively sold.
What can an average citizen do (short of living Ron Swanson-style in a cabin in the woods) to protect their privacy?
But also, giving to litigation groups that fight this sort of thing. EFF comes to mind, but I'm sure there are others.
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.
With a little bit of industry knowledge, I would posit that they made roughly the same quantum as the fine.
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).
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.
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.
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)