More from the article ...

... For decades now we've documented how while "smart" TV makers are obsessed with making money off of in-home surveillance (which is now more profitable than the actual TV), they do an abysmal job protecting the data they collect. They also routinely don't respect consumer choice when users say they don't want to participate in the full scope of hyper-commercialized mass surveillance.

That latter point is central to a new study out of Northeastern that conducted 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial "smart" TV devices. The researchers found that most smart TVs utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content and then monetizes that data to help build personalized profiles of viewers.

TV makers insist that users are supposed to be able to opt out, but the choice simply doesn't work across a large segment of TVs. Companies like Vizio simply ignored the consumer requests entirely more often than not:

"We find that the advertised ACR opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems; on Samsung Tizen traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in more than 60% of evaluated scenarios, and on Vizio SmartCast a content correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continues to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios."

These companies have been awful for a long while now, and U.S. regulation of the sector has varied between soggy and inconsistent ...