Number of Federal Complaints on Vizio Viewer-Tracking Feature Rises to 9

Two more class-action complaints filed Tuesday against Vizio bring to nine the number of federal lawsuits brought since mid-November accusing the company of violating the Video Privacy Protection Act through the “smart interactivity” viewer-tracking feature on Vizio smart TVs (see 1512060005). The nine complaints, all but two of which were filed in California, allege the feature tracks the content viewers are consuming, links it with their IP addresses and other personally identifiable information and sells the information to marketing and advertising companies without anyone’s knowledge or consent. One of the two Tuesday complaints was filed in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California, in which plaintiff Kathleen Sloan of Concord, California, concedes that “after initial setup,” owners do have the option to turn off the smart interactivity feature “by navigating through the settings menu on their TV” and “toggling” the feature to the “disabled” setting. But the complaint goes into elaborate detail about the “barriers” owners face in trying to opt out of smart interactivity. Among them, “the owner would need to be aware that they have been ‘opted in’ to the program, and no such warning is contained on the product packaging, sales receipt, user manual, or initial setup screen,” the complaint says. And even if the user successfully disables smart interactivity from the settings menu, Vizio and its third-party partners “still have access to all of the data” that the feature previously collected and stored about the owner, it says. Vizio hasn't filed a formal answer to any of the complaints, but lawyers for the company successfully motioned for a deadline extension to mid-February for filing an answer to one of the earliest complaints. Among the reasons, “several related class actions concerning the same subject matter as the instant case” have been filed, and Vizio lawyers are “diligently working to coordinate among the various cases,” the motion said. Vizio representatives didn’t comment.