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ReplayTV To Track Viewing Habits
drwiii writes: "This article over at CNN talks about a deal between Nielsen and ReplayTV to develop technology to track time-shifted viewing habits. The ReplayTV unit doesn't have software to track viewing choices, but it looks like it'll be getting it now. The article also touches on Nielsen's relations with TiVo and Microsoft (WebTV)." Fantastic. Now I'll expect junk mail every time I linger a little too long over Buffy . I think that if these machines are going to be used for market research, the networks should pay the bill, and they should be free to everyone.
Well, several things. First of all, the goal of targetted advertising and television ratings is to sell you stuff. It isn't to challenge, educate, broaden horizons, or install a sense of community or civic duty. If someone is white supremacist survivalist, they are going to get a steady diet of gun commercials and right wing commentators, reinforcing their beliefs rather than educating them about alternative views. This subverts the medium of television even further than it already has been subverted.
But there are other concerns, too. In communist countries and Nazi Germany, people would get picked up and thrown in jail based on inferences about their ideology, derived from the flimsiest pieces of evidence: books they read, newspaper clippings they kept, remarks they made to friends.
Of course, something as blatant and crude as that doesn't seem like it's in the cards in the short term for the US (well, unless the religious right wins).
Things are likely to be much more subtle in the US. Data mining programs will make inferences from your viewing habits, possibly combined with your shopping habits, about lots of aspects of your life. Are you a home gardener or are you growing pot? How sexually active are you? What's your likelihood of developing heart disease? Are you a dangerous driver? Are you financially responsible?
This kind of data could be used to determine your insurance rates, credit worthiness, school admissions, job eligibility, propensity to engage in drug use or other criminal behavior, etc. To the insurance company, police, employer, or school, it's only statistical averages that matter: if you move to the top of their list, they'll make your life difficult. And for the individual, it will be difficult to prove that anything unusual has happened; in fact, this kind of analysis isn't illegal as long as it isn't used as a proxy for race.
There are massive personal data collections going on, and with good statistical techniques, anybody with the money to purchase the data will be able to get statistically excellent information on you. You can bet that this data won't just be used for targetted advertising: the economic incentives to use it for credit ratings, insurance, law enforcement/profiling, and employment are simply too strong. And you can also bet that if your are a bit unusual or excentric (and who on Slashdot isn't?), you'll pop out of those statistical models, either as a bad risk to be avoided, or as a likely suspect to be examined, even if your excentricities are completely harmless.
Allowing this kind of data collection to proceed is setting a dangerous precedent. I think the Europeans are right in essentially prohibiting any on-line data collection that isn't associated directly with a business transaction and requiring all data to be erased when the business transaction is over (airlines aren't even permitted to keep your meal preferences in their databases). Will the US have to learn the hard way to be careful when it comes to privacy?
Anyway, it's set "20 minutes into the future" in a world where TV ratings are updated instantly on charts in the TV exec board rooms and they make quick decisions on the fly about what to do, yank, and manipulate to try to get those instant ratings up. The show's lead character is Edison Carter, a investigative news reporter who juggles reporting the truth over pressures from his bosses at "Network XXIII" to skew the stories to get the ratings up. Reminds me of the TiVo story!
In this world, it's against the law to turn off your TV. Really great stuff. Once in a while, a network like A&E will run a marathon of the shows. I have most of them on tape from the 80s (and still fairly viewable).
The show rocked, but got cancelled because it was playing against Miami Vice and Dallas and in the end, ironically, the poor ratings killed it in its first season.
Nielsen ratings are directly used to determine what programs stay on TV and what programs don't. Frankly, I think it would be great if the insipidly backwards, 1950s-style Nielsen Ratings system were updated to take into account today's technology.
:-)
As long as all the "tracking features" are disclosed up-front, this is a great advance. I'd buy one of these units just to get my "vote" for the shows I love a chance to be heard. As it is, so few "Nielsen Families" exist that I seriously question the integrity of the very ratings system which determines what programs I get to watch--low ratings, as you know, mean a show will get the axe. Currently, less than 25,000 households from only the top 48 markets get a "vote" in the ratings game.
This would be a first step towards perhaps changing that limited, closed, backwards system. I'm surprised that Nielsen hasn't gotten together with TV manufacturers to work out a deal--there would be even greater possibilities for revolutionizing the system if that were to happen.
This is just a small first step--only ReplayTV users, as the article says, in already-established Nielsen families, are going to have their usage habits tracked. But imagine the possibilities this could lead to, if the Nielsen people are encouraged:
Imagine a world in which your ReplayTV or TiVo, or even your television set, had a built-in modem and a small chipset designed to record your program choices and upload them once a week. You could choose whether to plug in your modem or not, so no privacy issues would be involved--consumers would boycott a "mandatory" feature like that, but welcome a voluntary one. Then, your viewing choices would have the chance to affect what shows stay on the air and which get nixed, whereas now your viewing habits have no value whatsoever since you're not a Nielsen family. I much prefer this model, than having a scant few families (relatively speaking) which supposedly represent some bonehead's idea of a statistical sampling, deciding which shows survive. I miss *My So-Called Life* and *Freaks and Geeks*, dammit!
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
"Now, at this point I should say something about privacy. TiVo guarantees that they neither monitor nor report your TV watching habits and preferences. All taste matching is reportedly done on your local machine, and no such data is sent back to TiVo. While I can't verify that claim, I will note that they are vigilant in making it clear that they respect your privacy."
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
User: Hmmm lets watch something different tonight...... Ahh channel 'whatever' is doing a report about the microsoft case.
Sound of user zapping with remote
ReplayTV9000: I'm sorry user I can't do that.
Sound of user trying it again
ReplayTV9000: I'm sorry user I can't do that. You have tried to watch anti-microsoft propaganda twice, this has been reported to Emporer Gates. Prepare to be terminated.
Grtz, Jeroen
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