Vizio slapped with two class-action lawsuits over alleged smart-TV spying

The company stands accused of sharing smart TV owners’ personal information with third parties without their approval.

Vizio, the company best known for its bang-for-buck TVs, is these days in the news for all the wrong reasons owing to some truly troubling data collection practices. And it doesn’t seem as if the controversy is going to blow over in a jiffy. On the contrary, as first reported by Consumer Reports, it has boiled over into court.

While that site only referred to a single lawsuit in its report, turns out the company is facing two different class action complaints. In both the lawsuits—filed two days apart in separate California courts last week—Cognitive Media Networks has been named as a co-defendant alongside the TV maker. Cognitive’s Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology is essential to Vizio’s ability to track users’ viewing habits, so much so that it acquired the San Francisco-based company earlier this year and renamed it Inscape Data Services.

Read more: http://www.techhive.com/article/3005718/smart-tv/vizio-slapped-with-two-class-action-lawsuits-over-alleged-smart-tv-spying.html 

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