In this story it was reported that Vizio televisions had/have the ability to spy on it’s viewers, and the company both used and sold this information. Well, apparently there is a way to disable this “feature” on Vizio smart televisions, as well as Samsung and LG. Here are the instructions for blinding your televisions.
I don’t see much value in making your TV unable to track what you are watching when Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, HBO+, your cable provider, etc etc all know exactly what you are watching and when. That horse has left the barn and is now shoe leather.
Done. Thank you for sharing.
I see a great deal of value in limiting who and what is tracking me and my habits. Sure, Netflix tracks what I watch on Netflix but I know that whenever I access the service. I don’t have a cable provider. I don’t expect my TV set itself to be reporting on my habits and don’t want it to do so.
You know, when I started talking about this stuff a couple of years ago, I got snarked and namecalled and Pitted for it.
Welcome to the new reality of two-way “entertainment” - whether it’s Kentucky Fried Movie, Max Headroom or any recent police procedural, we’ll find out.
I could care less about Vizio or anybody else tracking what I watch.
For the technically inclined, one solution is to set up a Pi-hole, which as your own little domain name server. You can tell it which domains can be served up, and which will be blocked. It’s a bit like blocking things with a hosts file, but it works for your entire network, including the “smart” devices that don’t give you control.
You use your smart TV to watch Netflix and Hulu? Set up the Pi-hole to only tell the TV how to connect to Netflix and Hulu related servers. No information will ever get to the TV manufacturer’s servers.
I haven’t set one up myself but I’m seriously tempted after discovering that my new Samsung smart TV inserts its own ads. So far they’re not too obtrusive, just little adds for movies or services or whatever sitting in the corner by shortcuts for services I actually use. But I’m not confident they’ll stay that way…
They are not just tracking your personal information and habits-they are/were selling that info to other companies. Where is your cut of the action?
Czarcasm didn’t call anyone a prostitute, mass murderer, or Nazi, so maybe that’s why he didn’t get Pitted?
Presumably if they didn’t have that extra stream of income, their regular rates would have to be higher, I’d think.
It’s not a service that is doing this to you-it is the company that sold you the television itself, so there are no “rates” to go up or down.
I wish that myth would stop. They charge what the market will bear, side they have competition.
The irony of it is that if you go to that site to find out how to stop your TV from spying on you, you get spied on by Wordpress. Among other things the site loads stats.wp.com. Seems you can’t win without obsessive vigilance! 
I have to agree, if i watched TV i wouldn’t care if you knew what i watched or when i watched it.
other than OTA a ton of people can see what is watched by who, when and where anyways.
It isnt like i put in my bank and credit data into the TV, so all you know is i watched twilight zone at 3am, and someone will probably show me an ad for classic TV shows on DVD
Not like your data is not for sale anyways and has been for many decades.
For 30+ years, if you had a name a job and an address i could buy your full name, telephone number, your reported income and your tax filing, your full address, your mortage payments and balance if you had one, your reported bank accounts, and your social security number etc.
Marketing and debt collection people have been able to buy this info for decades, it used to come in huge books, now its probably on DVD or something.
Thats already for sale, what do i care if you know i watch Gilligan’s island 4 times a week?
If you really want to be anonymous, well it’s free, i’m sure most of you already know how if you think about it
Yeah, could be. He’s more polite than me.
Of course, no one’s yet told him six times that it’s all imaginary and/or irrelevant.
I don’t give a damn if my TV tracks what I watch and reports it to anybody it wants to. I do, however, care if the thing is actually watching me (through the camera some smart TVs have). I don’t have one of those right now, but if it ever got to the point where all new ones have one, the first thing I’d do after hooking it up is tape something over it. And disable any ability it had to passively listen, too.
Hasn’t it been found that some Smart TVs are relaying sounds back as well? Not just for the “Netflix, play Addam’s Family” kind of stuff, but actually tracking whole conversations?
Oh yeah.
Note that many “smart” devices, while listening all the time, aren’t usually transmitting the sounds anywhere. It’s only when they pick up something with the key phrase: E.g., “Alexa, play Brass in Pocket” does the phrase get sent to a server where it can be recorded, sold, subpoenaed by police, stolen by hackers, magically end up in your ex’s divorce lawyers hands, etc.
But some “smart” TVs are not even a bit unethical about this, but are basically the products of very evil minds.
Again, it’s disturbing to think that having every single thing about what you watch, let alone everything you say, being distributed to who knows who isn’t considered such a bad thing by many people. Wow.
Not that it’s not “considered a bad thing” but just that it’s considered a reality of life. I grew up talking on the phone on a party line. I always knew that there’s no such thing as privacy, and that anyone who really wants to know all about me can find it out. So I basically just live my life, and don’t worry about it. I check up on the things I really want to protect (like I look at my bank account daily to be sure no one has been accessing it) but I never believe for a minute that I have privacy.
So if all the walls of your house turn to glass tomorrow, you won’t have a problem with it?
There are levels of privacy, and a party line is something used with the expectation that any of the other parties might (and often would be) listening; you spoke in guarded terms about anything truly personal or private.
I think most of us have an expectation that’s what’s inside our walls and behind our closed front door is very nearly the highest level of personal and family privacy; it is absurd to think that you have to be “on stage” for neighbors or passersby that might be peeping in your windows.
The level of invasion into this personal space - right to your connubial bed, if you have an Echo or smart TV in your bedroom - is unprecedented, and to blithely dismiss it as the same sort of privacy as a party line or living in a small town or “having nothing to hide” is a breathtaking example of what people can “normalize,” to repurpose a term relevant to our current days.
Let me know about those glass walls, because they’re already swiss cheese with big, big holes.