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Hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers had a surprise discovery last week: Their TV sets know a lot more about them than they'd ever thought, or ever agreed to.
It turns out Beijing-based Gozen Data, a leading Chinese TV viewership analytics firm, has been collecting personal data in real time using smart TVs — without users' consent.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers had a surprise discovery last week: Their TV sets know a lot more about them than they'd ever thought, or ever agreed to.
It turns out Beijing-based Gozen Data, a leading Chinese TV viewership analytics firm, has been collecting personal data in real time using smart TVs — without users' consent.
And I don't mean that in some kind of conspiracy theory way, just that your data is being collected unless you explicitly select setting to prevent that.
Do they "work" if you aren't linked to the outside world, if your Net is not wifi?
I had a smart TV. But it had no connection to the internet whatever, not even a cable box. So unless it had its own built-in secret radio with a secret transmitter, I have no idea how it could report back to a mother ship.
I can't stand most of the crap on cable, I used the TV to play movie DVDs, and used my cell phone to connect to the internet. TV was totally out of the loop.
The practice was first exposed when a user on V2EX, an online forum for tech enthusiasts, noticed their Skyworth-brand smart TV had become slow and analyzed the code of back-end programs to figure out why. What they found was a program that scans the user's Wi-Fi every 10 minutes and uploads a wide range of information to Gozen Data's website.
"What smart devices are used at home; whether your phone is at home; who is visiting and using your Wi-Fi; what's the name of your neighbor's Wi-Fi; all of these are constantly being collected and uploaded," the user wrote on April 22. The finding was later reposted on Weibo, attracting widespread concern.
"Weibo" is a Chinese app similar to Twitter. In the U.S. it's called WeChat, and is used by a great many people of Chinese ancestry in this country.
This article only mentioned they are doing that to customers in China.
But... coming soon to a liberal (i.e. socialist) government near you?
My SO somewhat recently bought a new speaker for us to stream music on. At least twice now, it has interrupted the music and the automated voice comes on and says something like, "I'm sorry, I didn't hear you." My SO read through all the instructions and couldn't even find anything about a feature like that to turn off, if that would even work. I know lots of devices are tracking us, but it never occurred to me that a speaker might be.
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My SO read through all the instructions and couldn't even find anything about a feature like that to turn off, if that would even work. I know lots of devices are tracking us, but it never occurred to me that a speaker might be.
