Your Smart TV Is A Blabbermouth. How To Stop Its Spying On You

Internet-connected televisions, often referred to as "smart TVs," collect a wide variety of information about consumers. The devices track the videos you watch from several sources: cable, broadband, set-top box, DVD player, over-the-air broadcasts, and streaming devices. The devices collect a wide variety of information about consumers, including items such as as sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education level, home ownership, and household value. The TV makers sell this information to third parties, such as advertisers and data brokers.

Some people might call this "surveillance capitalism."

Reliability and trust with smart devices are critical for consumers. Earlier this month, Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle privacy abuse charges by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

What's a consumer to do to protect their privacy? This C/Net article provides good step-by-step instructions to turn off or to minimize the tracking by your smart television. The instructions include several smart TV brands: Samsung, Vizio, LG, Sony, and others. Sample instructions for one brand:

"Samsung: On 2016 TVs, click the remote's Home button, go to Settings (gear icon), scroll down to Support, then down to Terms & Policy. Under "Interest Based Advertisement" click "Disable Interactive Services." Under "Viewing Information Services" unclick "I agree." And under "Voice Recognition Services" click "Disable advanced features of the Voice Recognition services." If you want you can also disagree with the other two, Nuance Voice Recognition and Online Remote Management.

On older Samsung TVs, hit the remote's Menu button (on 2015 models only, then select Menu from the top row of icons), scroll down to Smart Hub, then select Terms & Policy. Disable "SynchPlus and Marketing." You can also disagree with any of the other policies listed there, and if your TV has them, disable the voice recognition and disagree with the Nuance privacy notice described above."

Browse the step-by-step instructions for your brand of television. If you disabled the tracking features on your smart TV, how did it go? If you used a different resource to learn about your smart TV's tracking features, please share it below.