Vizio fined $2.2 million by the FTC for secretly collecting and selling owner information

Vizio did everything wrong when it comes to data collection.

Vizio has been fined $2.2 million by the Federal Trade Commission for "surreptitiously collecting details on viewers' watching habits." The company also agreed to delete all the data collected before March 1, 2016, and to get specific consent from users with a new privacy program.

Vizio's Smart Interactivity technology isn't much different from what other smart TV manufacturers use to find out exactly what you watch and when you watch it. The difference, according to ProPublica, stems from the way Vizio went about collecting it and what they did with it afterward.

For starters, Smart Interactivity is active and running unless you specifically opt out, and you're not told it's there or that opting out is even posible. Oddly enough, the instructions to tell you how to opt out have disappeared from Vizio's support site and have been replaced by a 404 error page.

While folks were watching TV, Vizio was tracking everything it could about the channels and amount of time viewers spent on them. They also collected your IP address. Standard stuff from the TV industry. But what they did next got them hauled into court by the FTC.

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