Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than TVs themselves
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv
(They are the ones with "10" in the ad-free column)
The dominant brand for ad-free models is in fact... Vizio.
Some TVs with ads actually have ads pre-loaded on them, so not connecting them isn't sufficient to defeat the ads.
You 'own' the device but you can't control it. It's 'smart' and you're dumb, because you controlling it isn't the goal.
I imagine the same way google improved their location services by driving around and literally collecting wifi network information, vizio can see where any TV not connected to the internet physically is if they send someone to drive around and look for their own TVs wifi networks.
I have always used “Smart TV” this way and have been at peace thinking I don’t have a problem. Am I missing something here? A Vizio TV can create its own WiFi Network all it wants, but it ain’t connecting to my home Internet. Why Do I have to worry?
Mesh with neighbour’s TV network which has access to their internet is more plausible to me and concerning. Wouldn’t this be illegal and a waiting class action law suit? (Using Neighbor’s internet surreptitiously?) and an easy one to spot at that?
And in terms of legality - you likely give them permission to do whatever they want in the terms and services you agree to on first boot, or install an app on your phone, etc. And you have no control of the TV's wifi - unless you hack the encryption or get direct access to the firmware you might never be able to tell whats going on. That's definitely beyond my capabilities.
Also, isn't wifi sharing how many products work these days, such as various find my phone features and Amazon devices?
You took actions that initiated the auto update mechanism (plugging in ethernet, typing in with password) that were the root cause of the issue you experienced.
It’s pretty much a TV + a set top box these days if you want to avoid ads in day to day use with most brands now.
I think out of the major brands only Sony hasn’t been pushing ads so far at least as far as their premium models go.
> Some TVs with ads actually have ads pre-loaded on them, so not connecting them isn't sufficient to defeat the ads.
Here you go, this is a link to more ad-free TV's
I'm curious as an owner of a Vizio TV that I think is a dumb TV...
Interestingly, the TV came with no remote, because it included a simple Android tablet, instead, which was supposed to be used as a streaming source and to run the remote control app. So in a sense, it was kind of like a smart TV, but with the brains externalized to the tablet. But when they decided to upgrade it to a proper smart TV, they also mailed me a regular remote.
But yeah, I was kind of irritated, given that I specifically bought it to be more of a dumb TV. I also took care to disable the screen scraping data collection.
For the same movie, netflix is not showing the same poster for me or my kid. For "the dead don't die", it's Adam Driver for me, Selena Gomez for my kid.
I'm going to rankly speculate that every smart tv does surveillance on the user on part of either the manufacturer or some third party that pays the manufacturer for the data. Otherwise why bother putting a damned wifi chip and browser in the thing at all? I'll take my tinfoil hat off if anyone can link me to an extant business model that includes all that smart business yet somehow doesn't leverage it to make money in our modern economy. But even then it had better be no data leakage by design (which, if it's connecting to the internet for whatever purpose I can't possibly see how that would work in practice)-- otherwise one update and you're back to square one.
Additionally, your link doesn't include the few tvs that happen to be good ole' non-smart tvs. Check out feature #9 on my Walmart special:
> USB – USB connects to USB flash drives for playing music and picture. The USB port is also used for updating the display’s firmware.
So good luck with your Smart TV Behavioral Modification Systems that may or may not shoot ads at your head, HN. Meanwhile, I'll be sitting in the privacy of my own home, sipping tea wile deciding which jpeg I'm going to play next.
[0]: The OS is terrible and the remote randomly stops working sometimes. Sometimes the TV would take tens of seconds to turn on, but then other times it was near instant.
Every single update since I've gotten the TV seems to make the TV even slower/more laggy. There was even an update about two years back where the Youtube app's volume was inexplicably an order of magnitude lower than every other input's volume (e.g. a volume of 100/100 on the Youtube app ended up being equivalent to a volume of 10/100 for all other apps/inputs). It took Vizio 1-3 months to fix it.
Unblockable ads on the home screen and genuinely multi-hundred millisecond response times on the app launcher infuriated me.
reset the tv and didn't connect it to wifi. Connected a dedicated chromecast. Works 100x better.
I'll have Netflix or Hulu open. Next, the TV will update, close my app, and take me to the startup screen advertising something like "We have Apple TV now!". Or, it will update and go to a blank screen which requires me to physically power off the TV because it's stuck. The remote is useless in this case since it clearly doesn't power down, but put it into sleep mode.
The $57.3 million is for the "Platform+" division. It includes profit from homescreen ads, selling of buttons on remotes, and cuts of streaming revenue. It's likely that only a small fraction of the division's $83 million in revenue comes from tracking and then selling viewing habits.
> It's likely that only a small fraction of the division's $83 million in revenue comes from tracking and then selling viewing habits.
It's good to have an example of cognitive dissonance now and then.
Selling of buttons on remotes absolutely does not involve 'tracking and then selling viewing habits'.
The homescreen ads may or may not involve any tracking - I suspect they likely do not - they're billboards, and they involve showing ads to users but not tracking their viewing.
(I have no information on how streaming revenue share is structured, so I won't assert anything about it. I can easily imagine it going either way).
Yes it certainly does.
1) sell button on remote
2) user presses button
3) sell information about button presses.
> The homescreen ads may or may not involve any tracking - I suspect they likely do not - they're billboards, and they involve showing ads to users but not tracking their viewing.
Oh yeah and the ads on your computer definitely are also only just like billboards.
It's certainly not profitable at all to know who's watching what when selling advertisement space. It's certainly not capable at all of determining specific names/addresses just from an advertisement load.
/s
Well that's obviously a different thing isn't it.
> Yes it certainly does.
> 1) sell button on remote
> 2) user presses button
> 3) sell information about button presses.
I'm not sure whether this is putting the cart before the horse, but it is likely that tracking button presses and other user interactions is providing the necessary data to make the sale of the button in the first place, and/or the revenue from the button is contingent on tracked button presses (ie. CPC or CPA).
Yeah sure. But there's a better solution: don't sell the button. Don't report what buttons were pressed. Don't invade your user's privacy.
I would wager that they look at how frequently apps are loaded on their TVs in an effort to determine which apps get their own buttons, and what rate to charge those companies for said placement.
For aesthetic reasons we removed the large flat screen TV's from our house. We now use projectors on walls with a skim coat and flat white texture. It blends right into our 1927 house. The projections are around 120 inches and look glorious. In the past week we watched John Ford's "The Searchers" and then "Avatar" in 3D. Both were amazing to see so big, bright, and beautiful. When we are done watching, the projector is put away and our home is not a constant display of gadgetry.
When ever I go into a store that has a wall of TV's they seem to get worse and worse every year with saturation dialed ALL THE WAY and images looking more and more like CG with smoothing and other weird filters. Perhaps i'm just old.
When I researched the best projector setup, I read that a gray wall may actually be better than white because it can result in darker blacks. I couldn't try it, though, as I was renting at the time. Have you ever experimented with that?
There are other things about the screen that are supposed to improve things (some kind of tiny glass beads on the surface), but also, it's gray.
That's probably what the glass beads are doing, reflecting the light and defocusing it in a consistent way. I vaguely recall that the optimal wall paint recommended by the internet was not only gray, but also satin finish.
Some people get quite involved with paint formulation, and for a while I played that game, but if I ever need to build a bigger screen I'm just going to buy one. Halfway decent ones aren't very expensive now.
We are only a month to 2022. This shouldn't even be a news headline. There are also plenty of other TV brands that does something similar. It is the whole reason why you can buy a 4K 55" TV for a $~450.
And a lot of people knows this. So for the past few years it turns out plenty of people are willing to sell their watching habits for a cheaper TV. Unfortunately TV business in itself is a low margin business. Unless Apple decide to do something about it I dont think there are any company that could change the game much if at all.
Because every TV has all the ways it spies on you listed as prominently as the price? And there's a near identical model for sale next to it, without the spying-enabled discounts?
Framing this as consumer choice implies consumers were informed and given a choice, but they were neither.
TVs get magically cheaper, is anyone asking why? They just buy it.
It's not on the box. It's not on the price sticker.
They have even ripped amps and speakers out of units, so they can monetize soundbars.
I had read that Google subsidized android devices, something like £30 a piece. So understand there is additional value in data sells. Edit: It may not have been android, but nokia's fork of Firefoxos on something like the banana phone.
The problem is that when it's endemic and not clearly labeled is that paying more may not do any good. Companies are very happy to charge you more to pretend you get something extra.
How are you so sure?
For example, if a TV has $15 of profit on the hardware and $30 of profit from ads, then you'd still see ~$450 models if you removed the ads and increased the price.
Even if ads could control me like a puppet and direct me to make purchases at any time, would the proceeds from that pay for the effort?
The targeting works, but the timing is abysmal and fails to introduce new products into my thought space at the time I’m making those decisions. In other words, they fail at their raison d'être
Haven't read it yet, looking forwards to it!
Some people never like really spicy food, but that doesn’t mean restaurants shouldn’t serve it.
He's not wrong, but then, neither was Stallman.
Then there is the main point of the article, which is Vizio doesn't care about being clean and undercutting competition.
A good chuck of Vizio's customer knows what they are buying, unlike companies like Samsung; charging premium price, “caring” about their customers but still involving in the same practices as Vizio.
And the author gets the point across, so this is a decent article.
I could keep it disconnected from my home network, except perhaps occasionally to update the firmware. Otherwise, all network content would come from a device in which I could place some level of trust.
Alternately, I could put it behind a Gargoyle router set to push all content through Tor. That would render some network content inaccessible, and Vizio itself might block Tor exit nodes.
Each of these choices introduces inconvenience and reduces function, but right now I would not trust my activity to Vizio, after seeing this financial reporting.
You get an excellent display for the price, use it as a display only and for updates thumb drive is your best friend.
If the firmware from the factory doesn't work, return it. If it does, never, ever connect it to a network, because it may stop working, start spying, or show ads.
It's possible that there is some nugget of value in that mess but your eyes have long since rolled so hard that you're worried you've sprained an optic nerve.
It's often better and more effective to have an article about one single novel thing than to bang a drum about how every single thing in the world is just the same pattern again and again.
Those are general economic concepts that aren't even broadly agreed upon.
Sometimes everything is connected, and sometimes your boss is just a shitty boss, or a company made an unethical decision.
Do you actually think that it doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong? Or do you just say that because in the back of your mind you’re thinking “of course they’re wrong”?
I mostly agree with this article's points, but I tire of having every article about a company doing a nefarious thing also including a sizable discussion about how it's a pattern. I already see the pattern. I've read articles about how MSFT and Facebook and co. have been doing this. I clicked on this article because I'm curious about the new news that the title promises about something I didn't know before.
Perhaps I'm alone in thinking like this, but if a person tells me they are going to discuss a topic but instead do a bait and switch by trying to roll in a dozen other tangentially-related subjects so they can get me to agree with them about a completely different thesis they should not be surprised if the listener starts to smile, nod, and slowly back away.
If you were interested in not being patronizing yourself, you could discuss how to measure sentiment vs behavior, or discuss results if it has been done before. You could possibly suggest an alternative explanation or approach that shows the flaws in what you deem psychobabble.
Is your goal to have insightful and rewarding discussion?
It's not "promoting ignorance" to just be tired and sad and not want every article to make you feel like crap just for living in a capitalist society. I already think about it enough on my own.
I'm not really sure what exactly you mean to say in terms of me "taking the bullet". It's not like I think it's my fault that these companies do bad things, but so much of the modern discourse, this article included is about how you should feel bad for having purchased a Vizio TV, or ever consider buying one ever again. The problem is, the more you learn, the more you essentially can't buy anything from anyone you don't deeply personally know without finding out they're terrible.
I criticize corporations plenty. Probably too much in terms of the hours in my day. I pretty much live in a cycle of depression every time I look at my toothpaste or ship something with Fedex. What else am I supposed to do? I kinda need a cellphone to have any amount of social life, but every company that makes them seems implicated in moral crimes. So I own a phone and feel like a garbage human for buying it every single day. It's not really a persecution complex when there's no alternative that isn't reverting to some sort of hermit lifestyle where you consume no media, travel nowhere, and only eat what you can buy from local farmers (that you hope aren't bad people). It doesn't feel healthy for my psyche, but I guess I'm doing something good for the world at large, right? Right...?
Edit: Ultimately, glibness aside, my worry is we've gone too far and "undone the damage capitalism has done" to the point where people are being told they're bad for just trying to be mentally stable in an otherwise crappy world. Like, if you're taking medication to stave off depression, it's not a good time to point out the morality of the company that makes the meds that keep you from killing yourself.
Sure, there's some folks who do too much to take a bullet for a company that doesn't need it, but it's all too easy to extend that to a point where you're condemning people for choices they're making where there's not really a better option that is viable for them. I highly doubt there's a lot of rabid Vizio fans. It's mostly just a lot of people who aren't paid well that want to watch a nice movie to relax after a long day at work and don't have the money to buy something "better". Is it really morally right to make them feel terrible for having done that?
If the first five things you pay attention to are obviously incorrect, do you keep listening in case there's a useful nugget in there, or do you switch to someone else's conversation which isn't rife with those problems? Because you don't know if what you were listening to was 100% BS, or 90%, or 50%, but you do know it hasn't been useful so far and there are other choices.
Or, put another way, why are you conversing on HN when there's plenty of discussions on Facebook you could be contributing in, and undoubtedly some of them would have useful info? I think the same decision making process applies.
Not in my experience.
No one wants to, and yet it helps in understanding what others' grievances are. In today's polarized world, sometimes you even have to bear reading through what feels as insane rants in order to understand what another portion of society thinks. I may not agree with certain political parties or social causes but I believe it's still useful to understand them. Even if every other sentence is exaggerated rhetoric, somewhere in their diatribe there usually is some hint as to why they feel that way
>Or, put another way, why are you conversing on HN when there's plenty of discussions on Facebook you could be contributing in, and undoubtedly some of them would have useful info?
I do make it a point to visit other platforms. I find different platforms can expose you to views of different groups. HN has a lot of high level tech industry discussion which I appreciate. But there are certain topics the community excels at, and others that leave me wanting. I find discussions on medicine tend not to go very in-depth on here, while on a larger platform like Reddit it's not uncommon to have MDs and researchers to participate. Facebook I can't speak to, I don't really use it because I dislike the platform for ethical reasons
I have interests in learning new, true things, but I've got options and priorities on what to learn next.
I do find that the angry part does correlate pretty strongly with people who can't really back up their sweeping claims or are simply exaggerating.
Is it, though? To me, this is a rather absurd equivalence.
There's a significant amount of buildup before the "Vizio" bit, but it's presented in a structured format, helps establish context about the "issue", and is backed by credible references at every step. A time-constrained reader might not find this to be the most friendly writeup, but that's a separate discussion about the authour's writing style, which has no relation to the analogy you presented.
Even a little cottage industry player for Apple or Intel is just grifting on large scale grift of agency and planet destruction; one shared reality makes it kind of hard to hide the whole economy is thoughtless dedication to death cult behavior.
So much pointless taxonomy is generated about our society. Free speech is great but like with infinitely big little numbers, it can just meander forever, as our political system is showing us.
What is frightening is the anger (i.e., emotion) policing that people programmed by big tech engage in.
If you want something a bit less spicy there's no end of press releases from huge tech companies for you to read.
A Microsoft employee, under an article that states unpleasant facts in the first few paragraphs about their employer.
It is natural for the author of the article to be accusatory, when there is a documented trail of illegal actions and repeated cases of customer exploitation from all these companies.
I don't find his style of writing persuasive, either, to the point where I believe that it isn't meant to be.
Numbers come from Vizio's reporting. Basically profits of 25 million on TVs and 50+ million on advertising
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/06/vizio-settles-for-2-2-mill...
They also violated the GPL in their products.
And this isn't limited to Vizio at all, a lot of new Samsung's have a higher price AND ads on it's home screen.
TVs now and in the future come with cell radios too. No need to worry about a pesky customer's firewall getting in the way of profits!
What legislation can we introduce to ensure that we own a device after paying for it?
Where “ownership” also means disabling nonessential functionality of our choice?
Right-to-repair legislation should be adopted to include something similar to the GDPR's anti-coupling rules so this can be verified at a deeper technical level; the TV manufacturer should be forced to make it work even if you disconnect all modems, network cards, etc.
The GDPR alone is sufficient for legal protection, the TV manufacturer can't stop you from using the TV just because you refuse consent for data processing - but not protection against bugs, bad actors, or companies operating outside Europe. Anything impacting hardware is more likely to improve conditions everywhere, even if only enforced somewhere.
Watch this video: https://youtu.be/urglg3WimHA
And I'm sure there will be an antenna to unplug, SOC that can be wrapped in a faraday cage, etc.
Not doubting you, I just never heard of it before. So it would be something to keep in mind.
Seems fair play if they're already ignoring open source licenses in the first place.
I'd look into it but I don't have a Vizio box.
Edit: seems like this is a place to start looking: https://github.com/spartan263/vizio_oss
I've seen it done - a friend swapped the screens on two completely different laptops - one did work, and well, one didn't ;) but 50% success rate for a random guy with a screwdriver is not bad. I wonder what would happen if we could identify a particular cheap, mass-produced, high-quality screen / panel that'd be easy to DIY.
We only buy for our clients and get a feed of only their placements, but essentially VideoAmp knows how many Vizio TV’s are online in every zip code and from that can with a fairly high confidence interval give a statistical accurate determination of what played on TV.
Most media includes ACR (auto content recognition) fingerprints for this purpose, either through VideoAmp or Comscore (comcast set top boxes).
The whole game for them is for you to get your “Smart TV” online and they entice with apps and now tons of shovelware-esq free TV channels like PlutoTV.
I wonder how common that sort of set up is.
Also note that disabling WiFi isn't always helpful - some devices expose ethernet over HDMI which the TV will use to phone home.
I suspect a similar thing happens with video content.
wait, is this really a thing? I've heard about hdmi over ethernet, but ethernet over hdmi? also it seems it would be a lot trouble to bridge the wifi connection and dhcp to this ethernet over hdmi interface, why should they do it?
Amazon Firestick is the same, although there's potential for more control since it's running Android.
Amazon's Ad business is one of its fastest growing segments.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/29/amazons-ads-business-nears-7...
Here it direct from the VIZIO CEO William Wang in an address to shareholders.
http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre...
This is always running whether you're using an app, watching antenna TV, or using a third party device. The only way to prevent it is DNS blocking with something like the pihole. And that's if they allow you to change the DNS lookup address.
And for limiting ads when my tv's connected to the tubes, I have a pihole.
Now Scribe.logs.roku.com is the most blocked address on my pihole.
I am curious how the accounting works on this, they could not make any profit on the surveillance without selling the TV's, but none of the TV cost is recorded as an expense for the surveillance numbers.
The rest is Cory Doctorow’s useless pontification, and an anchor link that doesn’t work.
In particular they are looking at ways to get more money from corporations, wealthy individuals, and governments, all of whom are totally flush with cash. Thus we have surveillance capitalism, which is about marketing the customer as the product to the people who actually have money.
I realized this as my own income has increased a bit in the last decade, and I'm finding myself perfectly willing to look up-market for products that among other things have stronger security and privacy guarantees. In many cases this means buying "business grade" networking gear, flat panel monitors as TVs, DIY home security surveillance (Blue Iris + business grade cams), etc., and all those things cost a lot more up front. Then I realized I was buying privacy, and that privacy is now a privilege for the upper middle class and above.
The solution to surveillance capitalism may be recapitalization of the middle class more than any techno-fix or even specific regulation of surveillance practices. The latter I think will fail for the same reason that much of the GDPR is empty: the legislators do not understand the tech well enough, and there's too much surface area anyway and thus too many ways to work around the law.
as a result, i really think we should be tying fiscal, tax, and monetary policy to median income (and the like) rather than gdp (and the like). this would wholly combat the hollowing out of the middle class, rather than piecemeal policies that tend to be inadequate and circumvented.
This is where the iot, the metaverse and other tech buzzwords converge: advertising. I guess.
EDIT:
On the subject: I had to look very carefully, but I was able to buy a TV from OK (https://www.ok-online.com/en/#televisions) with no software besides signal decoding. It's still got hdmi inputs so maybe i'll hook a smarter device in the future.
I keep telling Tim Cook that he (and Apple) needs to take a stand for privacy by stopping manufacturing and selling iPhones in China, but he never does. I wonder why not?
This swings too far. Yes, you can for a product and still be a product. Selling a product doesn't necessarily incentivized good privacy behavior. But using ads _almost definitely_ incentives poor privacy behavior.
So you just have to be careful, but on the net paid products are probably more aligned with privacy
I've been dreading the day that I'll have to deal with apps ignoring the pihole and using their own DNS servers, especially via https or TLS.
i bought a pepwave surf soho[0] a few years back, largely because it had a few other features (multi-homing, multi-wlan, robust vlan'ing, etc.) that i wanted due to my peculiar circumstances. it has limited blocklist support however, but does allow manual blocklist curation of arbitrary length, including cidr-formatted IP ranges. the main downside of this router is that it's 100mbps (actually ~120mbps)[1], but that's a limit i come close to very rarely in my day-to-day.
as with smart tv's, it's frustrating how few good router options there are.
[0]: https://www.peplink.com/products/pepwave-surf-soho/ [1]: note that this is sustained throughput, the ports are 1gbps. most consumer routers struggle to reach even this sustained rate.
That is why when you sign up for comcast they give you a free set top box absolutely free on top of a free peacock subscription. There is money on the back end of that to be made.
No you won't, because there will be no switch for that and it will include a 5G chip and therefore connect itself to the internet whether or not you want it to. Can't get online for 30 days? Sorry, you violated the TOS that you agreed to without reading and now your free TV will only play nyan cat on a loop.
Ubiquitous 5G, xfinity public access points, Amazon Echo networks will make it absolutely possible.
My fellow Americans, I am an expatriate who lives in the EU, and so I come under GDPR protections. It gives me quite some piece of mind to live where the State is thinking about and acting on these issues, even if imperfectly.
You, too, could have that piece of mind. There is a clear road from this rather dystopian reality, where a company can use and abuse your data at will, to solid protections with teeth. The first step is to believe it's possible and desirable.
You can scoff at all these companies today that are going carbon neutral as just "following the money" or whatever, but that's the entire point of capitalism. If something matters to most of us deeply, then we'll vote with our wallets. Eg. If most of us were so sick of how our mobile phones are apying on us, companies like Purism would be raking in billions. The truth is that most of us would rather have fancy cameras with fun case options. Capitalism isn't forcing our hands, we are the ones making choices - capitalism just reflects it.
Are the ads only on the versions that cost $99, or are they on the $500 and $1000 models? Did the hardware significantly change for the price point, or did the ad-free price point rise?
I'm not sure that's true. I've seen a lot of very rich people far more tolerant of ads than I am. Maybe because for them the problem is more "what interesting thing is there to buy" than "what should I buy with limited funds"
Which brand would that be? Samsung, LG and Sony all have ads in their major product lines.
And don't say "but commercial models!". They are missing a lot of features like multiple HDMI inputs and such, and I wouldn't put it past these companies to start adding crap eventually to commercial models too. The cost difference is also significantly higher than the amount of money they make from your via ads & surveillance because it comes with a bunch of commercial support features we don't want to pay for because we will never use it.
These terms imply some kind of personal connection. The police will put a suspect under "surveillance". Someone might "spy" on their spouse to see if they're cheating.
These are the sorts of scenarios that these terms call to mind. These imply a deliberate and focused invasion of privacy by another person who is specifically looking to uncover and reveal some information that you want to keep secret, in order to use it against your interests.
This really has nothing to do with a computer system automatically collecting data on what TV shows you're watching and the vendor reselling this information in aggregate from millions of users (or, just using it to allow some other vendor to automatically and impersonally select an ad to show you, along with millions of other users in the same algorithmic category).
It's a false equivalency intended to manipulate your emotions into fearing a harm that does not exist. The reason they have to resort to this sort of technique is that they can't point to any actual harm from this practice that ordinary people would care about, so emotionally manipulative trickery is their only option.
The thing is, with "dragnet warrants" (see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...) it is incredibly easy for your data to end up subpoena'd by the police. Secret services may not even need that and simply take all the data they want. And at that time, your TV, phone or other device has effectively become an espionage device.
This is why the European GDPR focuses so hard on data minimization: data that doesn't even get collected or stored cannot be abused by criminals and the government.
Not only that but that cache of power, it's not available to you but it's probably available to rich people and governments, further exacerbating power divides. The power of information is insidious and grows as you gain more of it.
What does this mean?
Or a personality/political profile could be built on a person from the shows they watch.
Or your social score could be reduced if you watch too many subversive shows. Oh but that's in China, and could never ever happen here, so no worries about building all the infrastructure to enable it. Except if you view terrorist content, then the UK feels justified in jailing you for 10-15 years [3]. But hey I don't think there's precedent yet for using smart TV fingerprinting for that, so why worry?
Lets give up our autonomy and privacy one tiny slice at a time. And when there is nothing left, you can point to each individual slice and explain to us how losing that one was totally insignificant and non-nefarious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...
It seems to me the only thing protecting these people would be claiming informed consent due to the dense EULA presented on activating the device. Im not really sure it would hold up in court though