[HCIdivision17]

Awesome. Note that this isn't merely a fine, but also comes with the stipulation that they "prominently disclose and obtain affirmative express consent for its data collection and sharing practices, and prohibits misrepresentations about the privacy, security, or confidentiality of consumer information they collect". And they need to destroy the data collected before March, last year.

That's pretty good! At the very least, this will make it so people are more aware of the constant telemetry. Some find that sort of feature useful, and others find it chilling, but at least this is a step in the direction of making it obvious.

[ysavir]

Sure, they can destroy their data, but everything shared with those 3rd parties is still at those third parties. It's not exactly accomplishing much.

[porpoisemonkey]

> Sure, they can destroy their data, but everything shared with those 3rd parties is still at those third parties.

Agreed.

I think it would be more effective deterrent if VIZIO had to work with those third parties to locate and delete the material that was transferred to them. This 1) would nullify the contract between VIZIO and those parties forcing VIZIO into back payment and 2) create an annoyance for the third-parties, hopefully making them think to ask how any data they're purchasing is being collected.

At a minimum I think that customers whose data was collected prior to March 2016 have a right to know which third-party companies purchased their information.

[x0x0]

This may or may not help you, but it's typical in these sort of data deals to

(1) mostly sell aggregate data (eg these demographics actually watch these shows / actually saw these commercials). You'd probably be more interested in the latter in order to connect commercials with purchasing habits, but you're going to operate at the zip code or grocery store level.

(2) If you are selling individual records, make up identifiers and not tie to IP addresses. Both because of privacy concerns and to force your ad-vendor customers to continue to purchase the dataset.

(3) from the perspective of someone in the ad industry, I don't buy 11m cookies for ad targeting. These data deals require custom programming on both sides, time from bizdev at both vizio and ad companies, and for ad-company sales to be instructed and helped to sell to their customers. So unless Vizio tv viewing data has pretty high reach, I'm just not interested. I can't really see someone interested in 11m cookies unless that data is integrated with all available tv viewing data from Vizio, Netflix, Samsung, set-top boxes, etc. I'm aware of some pieces of that being sold, but not all of them.

(3a) also, from the in-industry perspective, household data is often not that helpful. You're going to get demographics, if you get them, from the person in that household that happens to pay the bills. That's often unrelated to the person that spends time consuming media. So if eg parent X pays the bills in that household, but kids or parent Y spend the most time watching tv, this data is nowhere near as helpful for ad targeting as you would think.

[samstave]

So, I worked there along with the others who are all HN regulars. I cant comment on this fine at all, but I can comment on the reaction:

The system for identifying an individual via their digital habits is advanced and (in internet terms) ancient.

The credit card industry, for example, is way more an invasion of your privacy than what are effectively Neilsen Ratings on steroids... so I think people over react to this.

The fact is, that if you look at netflix, they have way more specific viewing habit info than any random TV which can state what it is watching. They already have their customer info, demographics, if they have kids, if they have account leechers like a brother or a friend who maintains a profile. They can see what IP/Device/app install anything is coming from -- and they have agreements with various device manufacturers to NOT track their (Netflix's) viewership/app use etc...

Netflix is probably the most savvy digital media company at this point.

While this data will enrich various entities over time at the expense of 100% privacy as to the content one is viewing, I would state that one would be better served to be worried about their chrome and credit card history than the viewing of particular TV shows.

Additionally - having a very intimate knowledge of how the vizio system works, I would not be concerned about this at all in the scheme of things as truly, its literally impossible to have a system watching all media streams on TVs throughout the world.

Finally, Vizio has done a stand-up job of enforcing opt-in/opt-out in the actual firmware of every set.

[bsilvereagle]

If Visio made complete backups (say full HDD clones) of all their computers on a weekly basis, do all of the backups need destroyed? Is it feasible to open every backup and delete the relevant information? Is it possible to "forget" that a backup process exists and still maintain the data?