A case has been filed against Vizio, a television manufacturer, for tracking their consumer’s tv habits and personal details without permission. And now a decision has been done and it requires the company to pay $2.2 million to the New Jersey state and another $1.5 million for the Federal Trade Commission.
The complaint against Vizio was filed by the FTC and Christopher Porrino, New Jersey Attorney General, which states that Vizio has been monitoring 11 million internet TV that they have sold to their consumers without consent, according to The Verge. This includes data from cable, streaming devices, broadband providers, over-the-air broadcasts, and DVD players. The data collected did not only track the viewing habits of the consumer but also personal details including viewer’s age, gender, marital status, income, education, household size, and home ownership.
In addition, Vizio is also collecting the IP address to match the addresses of their consumers and makes money out of it by selling the information to third parties, as mentioned in a report by Yahoo. Today, Vizio has agreed to completely stop all unauthorized tracking from their consumers unless given consent. They will also delete most information collected in the span of 2 years and keep it in a new private system.
Tracking personal information without the person’s consent is not allowed in the country which is exactly what Vizio did. The monitoring feature in their units was turned on automatically and had to be deactivated to stop. Fortunately, the latest models of Vizio TV already has the tracking feature deactivated by default.
For consumers using other brands of streaming devices or TVs, it's also good to check if their privacy setting is turned on just to be sure. Although Vizio is the only company discovered today to be tracking personal information, there is a chance other companies are doing it too, in one way or another.
