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Ever feel like your TV knows a little too much about your binge-watching habits?
Nowadays, unfortunately, your smart TV is almost certainly spying on you.
This is not something you should ignore.
DALL-E 3 / How-To Geek
The information collected is overwhelmingly used for ads.
Boring as that may be, you shouldn’t allow it to happen.
As of October 2021, Vizio hadmore than 18 million ACR-enabled smart TVs in the market.
Vizio
Vizio is the third largest TV brand in the U.S.
It accomplished that by selling TVs at a loss and then making it back through ads.
Clearly, there’s big business in collecting data from your TV usage habits.
What can you do about it?
Well, there’s one very simple solution:cut off your TV’s access to the internet.
Now, this does mean you’ll lose some of the functionality of your smart TV’s software.
You may have already disabled it, but it doesn’t hurt to check.
Depending on the year and model, there are two ways todisable Viewing Data on Vizio TVs.
Generally speaking, most smart TVs ship with low-powered hardware that quickly becomes laggy and slow.
Of course, tracking is still a concern with these devices, but there’s one important difference.
However, a secondary gear will not be able to see anything outside of the HDMI input it occupies.
At the end of the day, using internet-connected services comes with trade-offs.
It’s hard to banish all tracking completely.
Minimizing the number of connections is a good place to start.
