Vizio has been collecting some fairly personal data. The company’s TVs are able to track what you watch on a second-by-second basis, whether you’re watching cable, playing a Blu-ray, or streaming a movie, according to the FTC.
That data is then paired with demographic details on you. That includes “sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, home ownership, and household value.” The information is then sold to analytics and ad companies and used to target advertisements to you. This is something Vizio has been excited about: the data service, branded Inscape, was a key piece of the company’s IPO pitch to investors.
And, of course, accidently it become known only after it was sold to Chinese company.
And Vizio was fined to pay 2.2M$ for their data theft, which means 0.20$ per personal dataset (of which they amassed 11 million), so the fine might be well below than what they earned by selling this data, already.
How would they know the user sex, gender, income etc? Or would they acquire averaged, aggregated data based on your location?
Most probably they had some agreement with providers and also access to lot of more various databases made by companies.
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