Vizio has been hit with a £2 million fine following the discovery that it has been monitoring customers’ viewing habits and selling the data to advertisers. Tech company Vizio has been issued a fine and a deletion order by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) following the discovery that it has been gathering viewing habits of its smart TV customers without their informed consent.
Vizio, a subsidiary of Chinese giant LeEco as of last year, has been ordered to pay a total of £2.02 million in fines to the US Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, following a joint investigation which confirmed that the company had been spying on its customers’ viewing habits since 2014.
The investigation discovered that a division of the company dubbed Vizio Inscape Services, formerly Cognitive Media Services, had developed in-house content recognition software which automatically sampled a portion of the display in order to match the current image to a database of programme content — even if the content is being played from an external source, such as a non-Vizio-linked streaming service or physical media.
