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PirateDave

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_You don't need to be able to see the camera to respond to messages in the bottom half of the screen._

But the camera _does_ need to see you in order to unlock in this case. You can't read or reply to a message without unlocking first.

In California, there is the "Shine the Light" law [0] that requires a company to release third-party information to a consumer if there is identifiable information given to third-parties along with the data collected. So in this case, Vizio would be required (at least to California natives) to release those third-parties' names and associated data collected from you. [0] http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....

I just looked into why that is the case and if you hover over the little dropdown carrot for the "3.8 out of 5" you see this:

Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings using a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine learned model takes into account factors including: the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases.

So a product would just need a small percentage of 5 star reviews in the beginning of the review period.

This reminds me of an anecdote that a Marine officer once told me.

He said that when the Air Force builds a new base, they're given a certain budget and they build every part of the base, gym, mess hall, rec facilities e.t.c. and use the entirety of the budget to make the base nice and comfortable for the airmen that are stationed there. Then, when the base is almost completed, and over schedule, the party in charge asks for more money, and more time because they still need to build the most important part of the base, the flight-line.

I know this is most likely an embellishment, but being involved with government work in the past, it doesn't sound far off from the truth and felt it fit nicely in this situation.

If you've ever tried to purchase tickets for a concert that you know would be sold out, the process is horrendous.

I mean, they know when they'll have a surge in customers (there's a freakin countdown clock to the purchase time) and yet they still can't set up something more elastic that actually allows me to load the page?

I got the same feeling; I'm not sure what movie the reviewer thought he was going into, but it feels like he was expecting a David Lynch film or something similar, not a simple kid's movie.