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The judge ruled Tesla should have to suspend manufacturing and sales in California for 30 days, but the DMV stayed those rulings for 90 days to allow Tesla to comply.

The release of NetNewsWire 1.0 in February 2003, one of the first popular RSS Readers.

So far in my history of blogging and RSS, we've seen how weblogs emerged in 1999 as a new form of personal journal, began to link to each other in 2000 via blogrolls, turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs," and then became an interconnected ecosystem called the blogosphere in 2002. In 2003, blogging continued its evolution into a new form of media publication — helped greatly by the rapid adoption of RSS Readers.

In April 2003, I started a new technology blog called Read/WriteWeb (which I soon began abbreviating to RWW). While I'd experimented with blogging the previous year, my first effort — a linkblog called Modern Web — didn't stick. This time I was determined to write original posts and to regularly update RWW. I thought having a distinct topic focus would help, so I decided to write about blogging, RSS, and all the new web technologies starting to make waves at that time.

ReadWriteWeb homepage, 5 June 2003 (the earliest Wayback Machine copy).

My first post (which I've since replanted on Cybercultural) explained what I meant by a “read/write web”:

“The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it. The web was never just supposed to be a one-way publishing system, but the first decade of the web has been dominated by a tool which has been read-only — the web browser. The goal now is to convert the web into a two-way system. Ordinary people should be able to write to the web, just as easily as they can browse and read it.”

Before blogging took off in the early 2000s, creating an online publication required a level of technical nous that most people didn’t have. Since I was a web geek and managed websites in my day job (in 2003, I worked for a New Zealand power company), I did actually have that technical ability. But I was in a minority and I could see in 2003 that blogging was a game-changer for web publishing — anyone could now do it! As I put it in that debut RWW post:

“Products like Radio Userland, Movable Type and Blogger help people set up a web presence by giving them templates to enter their content into and a simple ‘point and click’ method of publishing it. With weblogs, ordinary people now have the opportunity to contribute their thoughts and opinions to the World Wide Web, in conjunction with browsing the web. We are approaching a read/write web.”

I used Radio Userland when I started RWW, but the following year I switched to Movable Type. The beauty of the blogosphere at that point, though, was that you had complete control over your blogging tools. As I discussed at length in my memoir, this would change with the rise of Web 2.0 and its proprietary social networks over the rest of the decade. In 2003, we didn't know how good we had it.

A fun blog index called BlogShares in April 2003.

Google Buys Blogger

The simplest blogging tool in 2003 was Blogger, which was entirely browser-based. “Push-button publishing for the people” was its motto. Its about page in April 2003 described the publishing process:

“… you provide Blogger a template of your page (or use one of several pre-designed ones) that indicates where you want your posts to appear. When you want to publish something, you simply enter it in a form. When you're ready, you hit a ‘Publish’ button that will automatically send your new page to your web server. No muss. No fuss. Total control.”

Blogger did have more advanced functionality that the likes of me could use (“your template can even contain script, such as server-side includes, ASP, or Cold Fusion pages”), but most people stuck to the defaults. Blogger was easy to use and blogs on it were easy to identify, since most of them used the default “blogspot.com” URL. Since its launch in 1999, it had gained enough traction to catch the eye of bigger companies. In fact, a couple of months before I began RWW, Blogger was acquired by Google.

Dan Gillmor's story on Google buying Blogger, 15 February 2003.

“Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals,” wrote Silicon Valley reporter Dan Gillmor on February 15, 2003.

Blogger co-founder Ev Williams describes live-blogging his reaction to Dan Gillmor's story while he was on a conference panel.

Google wasn’t yet a public company at this point, and had only recently begun to turn a profit — thanks to its AdWords online advertising system, introduced in 2000. But clearly it saw something promising in what Blogger was doing. Gillmor explained it well in his writeup:

“The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.”

As well as being a growing ecosystem, blogs were fertile ground for AdWords — probably the main reason Google bought Blogger. At the time of the purchase, Blogger had 1.1 million registered users according to co-founder Evan Williams (who would later co-found Twitter). Williams estimated that about 200,000 people were actively running weblogs on Blogger.

Blogger co-founder Meg Hourihan's blog days after the Google acquisition.

Blogging Communities

Radio UserLand was a bit more complicated than software like Blogger and LiveJournal. It was a desktop client, had its own scripting language, and also included an RSS aggregator. It was the latter feature, an RSS Reader, that really opened my eyes to the wonders of the blogosphere. I discovered a bunch of other blogs that also ran on Radio Userland — including Jon Udell's Weblog and Robert Scoble's Scobleizer, but also lesser known Radio blogs that caught my imagination, like Lilia Efimova's Mathemagenic and Dina Mehta's Conversations With Dina.

Dina Mehta's blog, June 2003.

Thanks in large part to the combo of read and write functionality in Radio Userland, I quickly became an active member of a community of tech and knowledge management bloggers. In this corner of the blogosphere, there were a couple of hot-button topics: open source technology and web standards. There were divergent opinions about whether, for example, blogging software should be open source or proprietary. Radio UserLand was owned by a small startup, Blogger was now run by Google, and MovableType's owners Six Apart were becoming more commercial.

But there were open source alternatives — notably, the WordPress project formed in January 2003, as a fork of an existing open source project called b2, and was launched in May.

WordPress in June 2003, a month after it launched.

One of the things my community talked about a lot was RSS (Really Simple Syndication), then an emerging web standard. RSS meant that my blog, Read/WriteWeb, was being syndicated to other people via my RSS feed, which could be read in any number of RSS readers — also called “news aggregators.”

As I mentioned, Radio UserLand had an RSS reader in its desktop app. But there were several other options available, such as FeedDemon and NetNewsWire (both desktop readers, for Windows and Mac respectively). In mid-2003, a browser-based RSS Reader called Bloglines launched; by August I was a Bloglines user and have used browser-based readers ever since.

Bloglines homepage, July 2003.

RSS syndication would become a crucial part of the blogging movement, because it enabled bloggers like me to be discovered and our content to be distributed across the internet. But in 2003, RSS was far from being a settled technology — it was an open standard that hadn’t yet worked out all the kinks. As noted in previous posts, there were multiple versions of RSS floating around at this point. The most popular in 2003 was RSS 2.0, created and run by Dave Winer, the proprietor of UserLand Software.

Partly in an effort to remove control of RSS from a single person or company, a community effort to create yet another RSS version began. The group behind this took a while to settle on a name; in August 2003, Tim Bray referred to it as "PEAW (Pie / Echo / Atom / Whatever)." But by December, Atom was the agreed name, and the 0.3 version had attracted support from the blogging ecosystem — most notably Google's Blogger.

Slide from a Mark Pilgrim presentation about Atom at Apachecon, November 2003.

Blogging Wars

Just like on social media a decade later, the early blogosphere wasn’t immune to the dark side of online discussions — arguments and public sniping.

On May 24, 2003, there was a post on Dave Winer’s weblog, Scripting News, that caught my eye. It was a link to an essay he’d written, entitled “Who will pay for software?” As a software developer, Winer was naturally concerned about his ability to earn a living from his work. “For the last few weeks I've been asking anyone who will listen if it isn't weird that our economy is based on software, more and more, yet users don't want to pay for software,” he wrote. He compared this situation to the music industry, where “songs travel freely over the Internet.”

Dave Winer's Scripting News, May 2003.

At the time, Winer was also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. On May 29, he delivered a keynote at the third annual Open Source Content Management Conference (OSCOM), hosted by the Berkman Center. He began by pushing back against the framing of companies like UserLand Software as “proprietary” or “closed.” He preferred the term “commercial software,” and added that “all the noise that people make about open source” had been “really destructive” to companies like his.

Winer told the OSCOM audience that he wanted his keynote to be more like a “live blog,” so he invited people to interrupt him. The keynote accordingly turned into a relatively open discussion, although Winer directed it from the front of the room. One of the audience members to stick their hand up was Aaron Swartz, a 16-year old computer prodigy who had helped establish the Creative Commons (non-copyright licenses for the internet) and had also been involved in RSS standards work. “So the important thing, I think, is that you should be able to fix bugs when the developer goes bankrupt,” Swartz said, referring to one of the key benefits of open source.

Aaron Swartz's website, just before his trip to OSCOM in May 2003.

Meanwhile, in the IRC backchannel, Swartz was doing an actual live blog of Winer’s session. According to his real-time notes, which were later published as a blog post, the OSCOM discussion got testy when one audience member said that Radio UserLand had “a support issue” and a “documentation issue.” Winer retorted that “there’s no damn money in software.” Soon after, there was a verbal confrontation between Winer and an audience member, Bill Kearney from the syndication startup Syndic8.com. This part of the keynote was cut out of the video that years later was published on YouTube, but Swartz live-blogged the carnage:

<AaronSw> Bill: saber-rattling. platitudes. democracy. benevolent dictatorship. guise.
DW: stop
<Mutiny> haha
<AaronSw> DW: had i known you were in the audience i would have said this
<Mutiny> damn i wish i was there.
<AaronSw> DW: I want to say this face-to-face: i don't like where you're going, i don't want to hear those thoughts
<sandro> damn i wish i was there. :-)
<AaronSw> DW: say them on your weblog. i don't want to go there
<Mutiny> this is getting juicy ahaha

The IRC user named “Mutiny” was clearly enjoying this feisty exchange, but like many online arguments before and since, the debate wasn’t productive. Whether it was open source vs. proprietary technology, RSS 2.0 vs. Atom, or any number of other geeky disagreements, in 2003 they often played out in public via blogging and the comments sections of popular blogs. Which meant it was even easier than before to amplify arguments — an early indicator of what was to come in later years with social media.

Yet We Had it So Good

Online battles aside, the tools of blogging and the burgeoning open standards that supported them (especially RSS and Atom) were truly revolutionary. The web was becoming more and more of a social platform, in no small part thanks to the participants of the early tech blogosphere.

Was 2003 the start of a truly two-way web, where users could just as easily write to the web as read it? I think it was! So it's an appropriate place to end this series on the history of blogging and RSS. If you have comments, well this isn't a blog...but you can tag me on the fediverse — the closest thing we have today to the blogosphere of 2003.

---

The history of blogging and RSS series:

1. 1999: Blogs Burst Onto the Scene, but RSS Is Slow To Settle
2. 2000: Bloggers Make Friends, but RSS Format Wars Kick Off
3. 2001: Blogging Gets Serious With Warblogs and Movable Type
4. 2002: The Blogosphere Takes Shape, Along With RSS 2.0
5. 2003: The Blogosphere Blossoms As RSS Readers Catch On

When Verizon refused to unlock an iPhone purchased by Kansas resident Patrick Roach, he had no intention of giving up without a fight. Roach sued the wireless carrier in small claims court and won.

Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon’s Straight Talk brand on February 28, 2025, as a gift for his wife’s birthday. He intended to pay for one month of service, cancel, and then switch the phone to the US Mobile service plan that the couple uses. Under federal rules that apply to Verizon and a Verizon unlocking policy that was in place when Roach bought the phone, this strategy should have worked.

“The best deals tend to be buying it from one of these MVNOs [Mobile Virtual Network Operators] and then activating it until it unlocks and then switching it to whatever you are planning to use it with. It usually saves you about half the value of the phone,” Roach said in a phone interview.

Unlocking a phone allows it to be used with another carrier. Verizon, unlike other carriers, is required by the Federal Communications Commission to unlock phones shortly after they are activated on its network. Verizon gained significant benefits in exchange for agreeing to the unlocking requirement, first in 2008 when it purchased licenses to use 700 MHz spectrum that came with open access requirements and then in 2021 when it agreed to merger conditions to obtain approval for its purchase of TracFone.

Verizon is thus required to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. This applies to Verizon’s flagship brand and TracFone brands such as Straight Talk.

“That was the compromise. For their competitive advantage of acquiring the spectrum, they had to give up the ability to lock down phones for an extended period of time,” Roach said.

Verizon decided it can change the rules

But 60 days after Roach activated his phone, Verizon refused to unlock it. Verizon claimed it didn’t have to because of a recent policy change in which Verizon decided to only unlock devices after “60 days of paid active service.” Roach had only paid for one month of service on the phone.

The FCC-imposed restriction says Verizon must unlock phones 60 days after activation and doesn’t say that Verizon may refuse to unlock a phone when a customer has not maintained paid service for 60 days. Moreover, Verizon implemented its “60 days of paid active service” policy for TracFone brands and Verizon prepaid phones on April 1, 2025, over a month after Roach bought the phone.

Company policy at the time Roach made the purchase was to unlock phones 60 days after activation, with no mention of needing 60 days of paid active service. In other words, Roach bought the phone under one policy, and Verizon refused to unlock it based on a different policy it implemented over a month later. Verizon’s attempt to retroactively enforce its new policy on Roach was not looked upon favorably by a magistrate judge in District Court of Sedgwick County, Kansas.

“Under the KCPA [Kansas Consumer Protection Act], a consumer is not required to prove intent to defraud. The fact that after plaintiff purchased the phone, the defendant changed the requirements for unlocking it so that plaintiff could go to a different network essentially altered the nature of the device purchased… With the change in defendant’s unlocking policy, the phone was essentially useless for the purpose plaintiff intended when he purchased it,” Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Henry wrote in an October 2025 ruling.

There’s still the question of why Verizon and its brands are demanding 60 days of paid active service before unlocking phones when the FCC-imposed conditions require it to unlock phones 60 days after activation. Roach filed a complaint to the FCC, alleging that Verizon violated the conditions. Verizon has meanwhile petitioned the FCC to eliminate the 60-day requirement altogether.

Customer rejected Verizon settlement offer

Before his small-claims court win, Roach turned down a Verizon settlement offer of $600 plus court fees because he didn’t want to give up the right to speak about the case publicly. Roach said he filed an arbitration case against Verizon nearly a decade ago on a different matter related to gift cards that were supposed to be provided through a device recycling program. He said he can’t reveal details about the settlement in that previous case because of a non-disclosure agreement.

After refusing Verizon’s settlement offer in the new case, Roach gained a modest financial benefit from his court victory. The judge ordered Verizon to pay back the $410.40 he paid for the device, plus court costs and service fees.

When it appeared that the Straight Talk iPhone wouldn’t be unlocked, Roach decided to buy an unlocked phone from Costco for $643.93. But he ended up returning that phone to Costco and paying Straight Talk for a second month of service to get the original phone unlocked, he said.

The now-unlocked phone—the one he bought from Straight Talk—is being used by his wife on their US Mobile plan. The court-ordered refund check that Verizon sent Roach included the phone cost and one month of service fees, he said.

Roach estimated he spent 20 or so hours on the suit, including arranging to have a summons served on Verizon and arguing his case in a court hearing. Roach didn’t get much of a payout considering the amount of time he spent, “but it wasn’t about that,” he said.

Roach provided Ars with the emails in which Verizon offered the $600 settlement. A Verizon executive relations employee wrote to Roach, “My offer is not an admission of guilt but trying to extend the olive branch.”

In his email declining the offer, Roach told Verizon, “I highly value the non-monetary outcomes I would achieve in court—transparency, accountability, and the absence of restrictions such as NDAs. Any settlement proposal that requires me to remain silent about the issue, while offering only modest monetary compensation, is less attractive to me than pursuing the matter through judgment. If Verizon Value is genuinely interested in settlement, the offer would need to reflect both the tangible costs I’ve incurred and the intangible but significant benefits the company receives by avoiding litigation and publicity.”

“It was really starting to irk me”

The FCC has taken no action on Roach’s complaint, and in fact, the commission could allow Verizon to scrap the 60-day requirement. As we reported in May, Verizon petitioned the FCC to let it lock phones to its network for longer periods of time. This would make it harder for customers to switch to other carriers, but Verizon claims longer locking periods are necessary to deter fraud.

The FCC hasn’t ruled yet on Verizon’s petition. Roach says Verizon seems to be acting as if it can change the rules without waiting for the FCC to do so formally. “It was really starting to irk me that they were basically just going ahead with it anyways while they had an open request,” Roach said.

He doesn’t expect the FCC to penalize Verizon, though. “It’s just kind of slimy of them, so I feel like it deserves a spotlight,” he said. “I’m not sure with the current state of the FCC that anything would happen, but the rule of law should be respected.”

The Verizon petition to relax the unlocking requirements was opposed in a filing by Public Knowledge and other consumer advocacy groups. Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer, who wrote the filing, told Ars that Roach “has a pretty strong argument under the law as it stands.”

Verizon must unlock phones automatically

The unlocking rules applying to Verizon used to be stricter, resulting in the company selling phones that were already unlocked. In 2019, Verizon requested a waiver to let it lock phones for 60 days.

The FCC granted the waiver in June 2019, allowing Verizon “to lock a customer’s handset for 60 days from the date it becomes active on Verizon’s network” and requiring it to unlock the handset once the period is over. This condition was expanded to TracFone and its brands such as Straight Talk in the 2021 merger, with the FCC approval stating that “For 700 MHz C Block TracFone devices that operate on the Verizon network and are capable of unlocking automatically (e.g., Apple devices), they will unlock automatically 60 days after activation.”

The 2019 waiver grant said Verizon must automatically unlock phones after 60 days “regardless of whether: (1) the customer asks for the handset to be unlocked, or (2) the handset is fully paid off.” The FCC order specifies that “the only exception to the rule will be that Verizon will not have to automatically unlock handsets that it determines within the 60-day period to have been purchased through fraud.”

Bergmayer said the FCC order “granting the waiver just starts a countdown, with no ‘paid service’ requirement, or room for Verizon to just impose one. Many people may use prepaid phones that they don’t keep in continuous service but just charge up as needed. Maybe people are fine with just having Wi-Fi on their phones for a while if they’re at home anyway.”

Given the restrictive nature of the FCC conditions, “I don’t think that can be read to allow a paid service requirement,” Bergmayer said. But as a practical matter, the FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr has been aggressively eliminating regulations that apply to telecom carriers under Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative. To actually enforce Verizon’s obligations under the current rules, “you have to convince the current FCC not to just change it,” Bergmayer said.

The FCC and Verizon did not respond to requests for comment.

Retroactive policy change irked other buyers, too

Roach wasn’t the only person whose plans to buy a discounted phone were thwarted by Verizon refusing to unlock the device after 60 days. Roach had learned of the discount offer from a Slick Deals thread. Eventually, users posting in that thread started reporting that they weren’t able to get the phone unlocked.

“My status: I used 30 days with Straight Talk. Waited another 35 days but it did not unlock,” one person wrote.

Some people in the thread said they canceled after 30 days, like Roach did, but eventually bought a second month of service in order to get the unlock. Although Verizon and its brands are required to unlock phones automatically, some commenters said they had to contact Straight Talk support to get an unlock. “Needless to say this has been an arduous journey. Good luck to others and hope you manage to successfully unlock your devices as well,” one user wrote.

There’s also a Reddit thread started by someone who said they bought a Samsung phone in February and complained that Straight Talk refused to honor the unlocking policy that was in place at the time.

“I called to ask for the phone to be unlocked on April 16 but was told it can’t be unlocked since it did not have 60 days of paid service,” the Reddit user wrote. “When I said that was not the policy on phones activated prior to April 1, the rep told me ‘we have the right to change our policy.’ I agreed, they do [have] the right to change their policy GOING FORWARD but can’t change the rules going backwards. He disagreed.”

FCC complaint didn’t go anywhere

Roach’s FCC complaint received a response from Verizon, but nothing substantial from the FCC itself. “There’s not really any sort of moderation or mediation from the FCC, it’s just kind of a dialogue between you and the other party. And I’m not really sure if any human eyes from the government even look at it. It’s probably just a data point,” Roach said.

Roach had previously called Straight Talk customer service about the changed terms. “There were a couple phone calls involved, and they were just very unrelenting that the only way that thing was getting unlocked is with the extra month of paid service,” he said.

In its formal response to the FCC, Verizon’s TracFone division asserted that it could apply the April 1, 2025, policy change to the phone that Roach bought over a month earlier. The carrier’s letter to the FCC said:

We understand Mr. Roach’s desire to use his device on another carrier’s network, and we want to provide clarity based on our Unlocking Policy, which became effective on April 1, 2025. As outlined in our policy, for cellphones capable of remote unlocking (this includes most iPhones and some Android cellphones) that were activated with Straight Talk service prior to November 23, 2021, on any carrier network, the device becomes eligible for remote unlocking upon the customer’s request after 60 days of active paid service.

Our redemption records indicate that Mr. Roach’s account does not have the required minimum 60 days of active paid service based on the payment records. Therefore, the device does not currently meet the eligibility criteria for unlocking as outlined in our policy. Once the account reflects the required 60 days of active paid service, and the device meets the other conditions, he can resubmit the unlocking request.

Verizon’s letter did not explain how its new policy complies with the FCC conditions or why the new policy should apply to phones purchased before the policy was in place.

Roach’s complaint said the FCC should force Straight Talk to “honor the FCC-mandated 60-day post-activation unlock condition for all affected phones, without imposing the additional ‘paid service’ requirement.” His complaint further urged the FCC to “investigate this practice as a violation of FCC rules and the merger conditions” and “take enforcement action to protect consumers’ rights.”

“Straight Talk’s new policy conflicts with the FCC’s binding conditions,” Roach told the agency. “The Commission’s order clearly requires unlocking after 60 days from activation, with no additional obligation to maintain service. By conditioning unlocks on two months of service, Straight Talk is effectively adding a term that Verizon did not promise and the FCC did not approve.”

Kansas consumer protection law to the rescue

In his small claims court filing, Roach alleged that Verizon and Straight violated the FCC conditions and that the retroactive application of the “60 days of paid service” term, without disclosure at the point of sale, is an unfair and deceptive practice prohibited by the Kansas Consumer Protection Act.

The magistrate judge’s ruling in Roach’s favor said, “It does appear that defendant’s change unlocking policy is contrary to the applicable FCC regulations.” She noted that federal communications law does not prevent users from suing carriers individually and that the Kansas Consumer Protection Act “contains provisions prohibiting deceptive acts by a supplier which would be applicable in this case.”

Roach asked for $10,000, mainly because that was the limit on damages in the venue, but the judge decided to award him damages in the amount of his actual losses. “He lost the benefit of the bargain he made with defendant such that his damages were loss of the $410.40,” the ruling said.

Straight Talk’s terms of service require disputes to be resolved either in arbitration or small claims court. Verizon pays the arbitration fees if users go that route. Arbitration is “a little more murky” in terms of how the parties’ interests are aligned, Roach said.

“When the arbitrators are being paid by Verizon, are they really a neutral party?” he said. Roach also said he “thought it was honestly just a good opportunity for an easy win and an opportunity to learn about the small claims court system a bit. So at that point I was like, if I don’t make any money from this, whatever, but at least I’ll learn a little bit about the process.”

Verizon’s “argument was pretty weak”

Roach said he did not consult with a lawyer on his small claims case, instead opting to do it all himself. “The first time I showed up to court for the original date, they asked for proof of the returned mail summons, and I did not have that,” he said.

The court hearing was rescheduled. When it was eventually held, the carrier sent a representative to argue against Roach.

“Their argument was pretty weak, I guess,” Roach said. “It was basically like, ‘Well, he didn’t pay the two months of service, so we didn’t unlock his phone. We offered him a settlement but he rejected it.’… My argument was, yeah, the terms had changed in kind of a consumer-unfriendly way. But beyond that, it was the fact that the terms had changed from something that was legal to something that was not legal with the federal regs. So regardless of the fact that the terms had changed, the current terms were illegal, which I thought was my strongest argument. And then I also put in that it was probably a violation of Kansas consumer protection law, which I’m glad I did.”

Roach said that toward the end of the hearing, the judge indicated that she couldn’t make a judgment based on FCC regulations and would need to rule on what the Kansas court has jurisdiction over. She issued the ruling that Verizon violated the state’s consumer protection law about five or six weeks later, he said.

Given that the FCC hasn’t acted on Verizon’s petition to change the unlocking rules, the federal regulations “haven’t changed at all in regards to Verizon’s obligation to unlock devices,” Roach said. He believes it would be relatively easy for consumers who were similarly harmed to beat Verizon in court or even to pursue a class action.

“I would think this would be a slam dunk for any further cases,” Roach said. “I don’t think I have any grounds anymore since my damages have been resolved, but it seems like it’d be a very easy class action for somebody.”

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five large TV manufacturers yesterday, alleging that their smart TVs spy on viewers without consent. Paxton sued Samsung, the longtime TV market share leader, along with LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL.

“These companies have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (‘ACR’) technology,” Paxton’s office alleged in a press release that contains links to all five lawsuits. “ACR in its simplest terms is an uninvited, invisible digital invader. This software can capture screenshots of a user’s television display every 500 milliseconds, monitor viewing activity in real time, and transmit that information back to the company without the user’s knowledge or consent. The companies then sell that consumer information to target ads across platforms for a profit. This technology puts users’ privacy and sensitive information, such as passwords, bank information, and other personal information at risk.”

The lawsuits allege violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, seeking damages of up to $10,000 for each violation and up to $250,000 for each violation affecting people 65 years or older. Texas also wants restraining orders prohibiting the collection, sharing, and selling of ACR data while the lawsuits are pending.

Texas argues that providing personalized content and targeted advertising are not legitimate purposes for collecting ACR data about consumers. The companies’ “insatiable appetite for consumer data far exceeds what is reasonably necessary,” and the “invasive data harvesting is only needed to increase advertisement revenue, which does not satisfy a consumer-necessity standard,” the lawsuits say.

Paxton is far from the first person to raise privacy concerns about smart TVs. The Center for Digital Democracy advocacy group said in a report last year that in “the world of connected TV, viewer surveillance is now built directly into the television set, making manufacturers central players in data collection, monitoring, and digital marketing.” We recently published a guide on how to break free from smart TV ads and tracking.

“Companies using ACR claim that it is all opt-in data, with permission required to use it,” the Center for Digital Democracy report said. “But the ACR system is bundled into new TVs as part of the initial set-up, and its extensive role in monitoring and sharing viewer actions is not fully explained. As a consequence, most consumers would be unaware of the threats and risks involved in signing up for the service.”

“Mass surveillance system” in US living rooms

Pointing out that Hisense and TCL are based in China, Paxton’s press release said the firms’ “Chinese ties pose serious concerns about consumer data harvesting and are exacerbated by China’s National Security Law, which gives its government the capability to get its hands on US consumer data.”

“Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Paxton said. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.”

The Paxton lawsuits, filed in district courts in several Texas counties, are identical in many respects. The complaints allege that TVs made by the five companies “aren’t just entertainment devices—they’re a mass surveillance system sitting in millions of American living rooms. What consumers were told would enhance their viewing experience actually tracks, analyzes, and sells intimate details about everything they watch.”

Using ACR, each company “secretly monitors what consumers watch across streaming apps, cable, and even connected devices like gaming consoles or Blu-ray players,” and harvests the data to build profiles of consumer behavior and sell the data for profit, the complaints say.

We contacted the five companies sued by Texas today. Sony, LG, and Hisense responded and said they would not comment on a pending legal matter.

Difficult opt-out processes detailed

The complaints allege that the companies fail to obtain meaningful consent from users. The following excerpt is from the Samsung lawsuit but is repeated almost verbatim in the others:

Consumers never agreed to Samsung Watchware. When families buy a television, they don’t expect it to spy on them. They don’t expect their viewing habits packaged and auctioned to advertisers. Yet Samsung deceptively guides consumers to activate ACR and buries any explanation of what that means in dense legal jargon that few will read or understand. The so-called “consent” Samsung obtains is meaningless. Disclosures are hidden, vague, and misleading. The company collects far more data than necessary to make the TV work. Consumers are stripped of real choice and kept in the dark about what’s happening in their own homes on Samsung Smart TVs.

Samsung and other companies force consumers to go through multistep menus to exercise their privacy choices, Texas said. “Consumers must circumnavigate a long, non-intuitive path to exercise their right to opt-out,” the Samsung lawsuit said. This involves selecting menu choices for Settings, Additional Settings, General Privacy, Terms & Privacy, Viewing Information Services, and, finally, “Disable,” the lawsuit said. There are “additional toggles for Interest-Based Ads, Ad Personalization, and Privacy Choices,” the lawsuit said.

The “privacy choices are not meaningful because opt-out rights are scattered across four or more separate menus which requires approximately 15+ clicks,” the lawsuit continued. “To fully opt-out of ACR and related ad tracking on Samsung Smart TVs, consumers must disable at least two settings: (1) Viewing Information Services, and (2) Interest-Based Ads. Each of which appear in different parts of the setting UI. Conversely, Samsung provides consumers with a one-click enrollment option to opt-in during the initial start-up process.”

When consumers first start up a Samsung smart TV, they “must click through a multipage onboarding flow before landing on a consent screen, titled Smart Hub Terms & Conditions,” the lawsuit said. “Upon finally reaching the consent screen, consumers are presented with four notices: Terms & Conditions: Dispute Resolution Agreement, Smart Hub U.S. Policy Notice, Viewing Information Services, and Interest-Based Advertisements Service U.S. Privacy Notice, with only one button prominently displayed: I Agree to all.”

Deceptive trade practices alleged

It would be unreasonable to expect consumers to understand that Samsung TVs come equipped with surveillance capabilities, the lawsuit said. “Most consumers do not know, nor have any reason to suspect, that Samsung Smart TVs are capturing in real-time the audio and visuals displayed on the screen and using the information to profile them for advertisers,” it said.

Paxton alleges that TV companies violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act with misrepresentations regarding the collection of personal information and failure to disclose the use of ACR technology. The lawsuit against Hisense additionally alleges a failure to disclose that it may provide the Chinese government with consumers’ personal data.

Hisense “fails to disclose to Texas Consumers that under Chinese law, Hisense is required to transfer its collections of Texas consumers’ personal data to the People’s Republic of China when requested by the PRC,” the lawsuit said.

The TCL lawsuit doesn’t include that specific charge. But both the Hisense and TCL complaints say the Chinese Communist Party may use ACR data from the companies’ smart TVs “to influence or compromise public figures in Texas, including judges, elected officials, and law enforcement, and for corporate espionage by surveilling those employed in critical infrastructure, as part of the CCP’s long-term plan to destabilize and undermine American democracy.”

The TVs “are effectively Chinese-sponsored surveillance devices, recording the viewing habits of Texans at every turn without their knowledge or consent,” the lawsuits said.

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