|
|
|
|
|
|
by xanderstrike
3427 days ago
|
|
|
Can you expand a little on how the article said the identification worked? It says it takes a set of pixels, does this patch of pixels get stored? How big is it? If it's stored, how is it protected? Is it encrypted at rest? I have a Visio TV, I use it as a computer monitor. There's every possibility that PII or plaintext credentials might have been transmitted as part of this collection scheme. What did you do to mitigate that danger? |
|
|
The way the system works is that there are a series of patches on the screen, and the RGB values of the collection of patches is captured and creates a fingerprint of what is being displayed on the screen.
This fingerprint is sent to the detection engine that has a DB of all the screens that were ingested into the content DB.
The system simply looks up the fingerprint value against the vast DB to see if it was something that was ingested.
The only thing ingested are broadcast television shows. no netflix youtube etc...
So anytime you use the screen as a monitor, or a kiosk, or a security camera display - anything other than an actual television - the system will not recognize that you're watch Ellen at 4pm PST and are currently 10 minutes into the show.
Thats all it does.
The goal was to have overlay events that allow for interactivity if a certain show or commercial is shown. That system didnt really make it too far in production.
Finally, if youre using a TV as a monitor - the system will see that they have never detected anything from that particular TV and it will simply ignore it. At certain points all the TVs that had never detected any TV ACR were just turned off and told to not talk to the system at all.
There really is nothing personal to worry about with this, IMO - and I am not "defending Vizio" -- I just know very intimately how the thing works as I helped build some of it, and I know that its not nearly as invasive as people think.
For example - there is a lot of foreign content on TV - spanish, chinese, filipino, indian, etc... none of this is ingested and never detected.