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The FTC Fined Vizio $2.2 Million in 2017 for Tracking 11 Million Smart TVs Without Consent. The Remedy Was a Consent Screen, and a Peer-Reviewed Study Later Found LG Sets Fingerprinting Whatever Is on Screen Every Fifteen Seconds.

The Complaints Department

The Complaints Department

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The FTC Fined Vizio $2.2 Million in 2017 for Tracking 11 Million Smart TVs Without Consent. The Remedy Was a Consent Screen, and a Peer-Reviewed Study Later Found LG Sets Fingerprinting Whatever Is on Screen Every Fifteen Seconds.
Photo by Oscar Nord / Unsplash

In February 2017, Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million to the Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General to settle charges that it had collected viewing data from roughly 11 million televisions without telling anyone. The software had been running since February 2014. It recorded what was on the screen second by second, and Vizio sold that record alongside the set's IP address, its MAC address, and the names of nearby Wi-Fi networks — enough for a third party to attach a household's viewing history to its sex, age, income, marital status, education, and home ownership.

The settlement order did not tell Vizio to stop. It told Vizio to ask. The company was required to "prominently disclose" the collection and obtain "affirmative express consent" for it, to delete what it had gathered before March 2016, and to run a privacy program subject to biennial assessment. The industry read the order closely and complied with it exactly. Nine years later, every major television brand collects the same category of data, and every one of them has a consent screen.

The Remedy Became the Interface

What the FTC created in 2017 was not a limit on collection. It was a specification for a compliance artifact: a screen, shown once, at setup. It governs disclosure and consent, and says nothing about how much may be collected once consent is given.

Vizio's competitors did not need to be sued to learn the lesson. They needed only to read the order, which is public.

In November 2024, researchers from UC Davis, University College London, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid presented the first systematic measurement of the technology at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, putting Samsung and LG sets on instrumented networks and watching what left them. Samsung transmitted content fingerprints roughly once a minute. LG transmitted them every fifteen seconds.

The finding that matters most is what the fingerprinting does not distinguish. Automatic content recognition identifies whatever is on the panel, including material arriving over HDMI from a laptop, a games console, or a cable box. A set used strictly as a monitor is still, by default, describing its own screen to a server every fifteen seconds. The researchers confirmed the privacy settings do switch this off. They also confirmed it ships on.

The Television Is the Loss Leader

The reason the screen exists is visible in the accounts of the one company that reported the two businesses separately. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Vizio's Platform+ segment — advertising and data — produced $105.4 million in gross profit. The company's total gross profit that quarter was $98.1 million. The division that manufactures and ships televisions was not merely less profitable than the advertising business. It was subtracting from it.

Walmart completed its acquisition of Vizio in December 2024 for approximately $2.3 billion, and was explicit that the advertising business was the asset. A company that sells a television at a loss has not made a pricing error. It has correctly identified which of its two products the customer is.

The Ad Business LG Bought

LG acquired a 50.1 percent stake in the ACR firm Alphonso in 2021 and rebranded it LG Ad Solutions. Its president of global ad sales is Serge Matta. On 24 September 2019, the SEC charged Matta and his former employer comScore with a scheme to overstate revenue by approximately $50 million through non-monetary transactions in which the two parties swapped data sets at inflated valuations, with no money changing hands. The SEC found he had lied to comScore's internal accountants and its outside auditor. He settled without admitting wrongdoing, paid a $700,000 penalty, reimbursed the company $2.1 million, and accepted a ten-year bar from serving as an officer or director of a public company. The scheme ran from February 2014 to February 2016 — the same two years the FTC ordered Vizio to erase.

The bar covers public companies. LG Ad Solutions is not one, a distinction its parent has fought in court to preserve. LG had promised Alphonso's minority shareholders an IPO within five years. When the unit's revenue reached roughly $270 million and its valuation passed $1 billion, LG's leadership removed three of the founders on 16 December 2022, in an operation its own executives named Project Wall-E, after the Pixar film about a robot that collects garbage. The founders sued in Delaware twice and won twice, recovering their board seats and their IPO rights. The company whose stated advantage is owning the glass could not hold on to the subsidiary that reads it.

The Part Nobody Consented To

In June 2026, the analysis firm Spur reported that more than 42 percent of the applications in LG's webOS store, and more than a quarter of those for Samsung's Tizen platform, shipped with software development kits that enrol the television in a residential proxy network, turning the set into a relay through which a paying stranger's web traffic leaves the house wearing the household's own address. The majority were tied to a single provider, Bright Data. LG senior vice president John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the following month that the company was working with developers to remove the capability and would suspend the apps that kept it.

This was not in the setup screen. It arrived later, inside a downloaded app, under whatever the app itself thought to ask.

The 2017 order established a consumer's right to be asked first, and left one mechanism for enforcing it when the asking goes wrong, which is to sue. LG's terms of use, accepted during the same setup flow, provide that the parties waive the right to trial by jury and to participate in any class, mass, group, representative, or collective action. Both rights are settled in one sitting, in a room where someone would like to watch something.

Filed from public reporting:

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