Vizio

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Vizio

Basic information
Founded	2002
Legal Structure	Subsidiary
Industry	Electronics
Also known as
Official website	https://www.vizio.com/

Vizio is an American designer of televisions, soundbars, and related software and accessories that has been owned by Walmart since 2024.

Consumer impact summary

Privacy Violations

• Consumers unaware their viewing habits were being tracked
• Personal information linked to viewing data without consent
• Data shared with multiple third parties

Financial Impact

• Consumers unknowingly subsidized lower TV prices through data sales
• No direct compensation to affected consumers despite $2.2 million settlement
• Data collection potentially continued for years before discovery

Incidents

This is a list of all consumer protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Vizio category.

FTC fines Vizio forselling user data without consent (2017):

Main article: Vizio fined by the FTC for collecting and selling user data without consumer consent

Vizio sold consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others without consent. The company provided consumers’ IP addresses to data aggregators, who then matched the address with an individual consumer or household. Vizio’s contracts with third parties prohibited the re-identification of consumers and households by name, but allowed a host of other personal details – for example, sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, and home ownership. And Vizio permitted these companies to track and target its consumers across devices.

SFC sues Vizio for violating GPL (2021 - Present):

Main article: Vizio sued over unfairly appropriated software for their SmartCast system

On 19 October 2021, the SFC sued Vizio over the alleged unfairly appropriated software in their SmartCast system. The SFC argues that Vizio’s alleged failure to adhere to copyleft-licensing requirements denies rights that are guaranteed to downstream users.

Vizio strongly disagrees with Consumer Reports not recommending them anymore (2019):

Vizio does not address the concerns raised by the reports, and instead states "It inherently assumes that TVs from 2010 should behave the same as TVs today in terms of performance.", "The applications (apps) on connected TVs are dependent on a multitude of third-party service providers. The number of variables involved in the performance of connected TVs is greater than for non-connected TVs." Consumer Reports revealed that Vizio has subpar reliability relative to other TV manufacturers, which is also among competing smart tv's.

See also

• LG Television sale of personal data