A new class action lawsuit is accusing Chinese electronics manufacturer Hisense of secretly harvesting viewing data and personal information from millions of American households through its smart televisions.
The lawsuit, filed May 12 in federal court in San Francisco, alleges that Hisense embedded surveillance-style tracking technology into its smart TVs that allowed the company to monitor what users watched and collect detailed information about their behavior inside their homes.
The suit was brought by the law firm Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise against Hisense USA Corporation, the American subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned electronics giant. Plaintiffs claim the company’s televisions contain automatic content recognition, or ACR, technology capable of continuously capturing screen activity and linking it to household and device identifiers.
According to the complaint, the technology allegedly records “every sound and image displayed on the screen as often as every 500 milliseconds” and distributes the information to advertising firms, data brokers, and affiliated Chinese entities.
The lawsuit further alleges that data gathered by Hisense could ultimately be accessible to the Chinese Communist government because Chinese law requires companies to cooperate with state intelligence demands.
“Hisense’s Smart TVs sit in millions of American living rooms, including the homes of military servicemembers, intelligence-community personnel, judges, elected officials, journalists and dissidents,” the plaintiffs stated in the filing.
At this point what’s the difference? There are so many Flock “safety” cameras watching your every move in Salisbury big data knows your every move anyway.
your car tracks and spys on you, your phone does the same, you bank does it, the government does it, walmart does it, what’s the problem here? you have no right to privacy!