Your Tivo Is Watching You

photozz writes: "Salon is running this story about Tivo and their plans to track user viewing habits for targeted ads. It also explores their stance on the 'hacking' of the Tivo for more memory." According to their CEO Mike Ramsay, "We do that in a non-personal way, protecting everybody's privacy," but the details of the actual data aggregation aren't addressed here. That the data is gathered should come as no surprise to anyone who notes that Tivo features a "learning" program-suggestion feature, but the mechanism and how closely data is linked to the customer is something I wish they would explain in more detail.

Comments

they have a pretty decent privacy policy

[legLess]

Check it out here. Final words are:

Please Note: Our privacy policy may change over time. In addition to posting any changes on our web site, www.tivo.com, we will provide or send a notice to each TiVo customer before any changes are implemented. You have our commitment that, regardless of any changes that might be made in the future, you will remain in complete control of your personal viewing information.

Bold is mine. This is light years ahead of most privacy policies, and they seem to be upfront about what info they use and what they don't.

Truly anonymous targeted ads are a Good Thing, as long as they are (let's repeat that) truly anonymous. They bring revenue for the company and are perhaps even useful to the consumer. (How much revenue is another thing - he flat-out admits that 80% of people fast-forward the ads.)

simple solution

[legLess]

If you don't like it, don't use the service. They don't have a right to your private (although anonymous, they say) information anymore than you have a right to TV.

marketing mixup

[aint]

day #1 :
Daughter watches smurfs.
Dad watches porn.

day #3 :
Dad sees "My Little Pony" commercials.
Daugher sees "I'm So Horny" commercials.


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Here's what the Tivo REALLY does... The truth...

[Otto]

The thing is hackable, you know. It runs Linux. If you're worried about what it's sending back, did it occur to nobody to just look?

Three files are uploaded to TiVo daily: tivoLog.pub, tivoLog.prv, and a log for 'myworld', the program that runs the machine.

tivoLog.pub appears to contain info on internal errors that have occured, but is usually empty.
tivoLog.prv is the issue here, it contains a log of every program watched and every button pressed on the remote.

Now, looking at the dialup scripts (Yes! It's all scripted!) You can see how it RANDOMIZES the name of the file before uploading it. No identifying information at all is in the file itself, the serial number isn't there. The serial number is used as the filename for upload, after being randomized. It appears possible for TiVo to change a setting and have the serial as the file name not randomized, but this is not set. It seems to be for debug purposes.

Sheesh.

Now the kicker: why shouldn't they have this info? It says it's taken in the manual. It says so on the site. Call up customer service and ask, they won't deny that they get it. One thing they do claim is that it's totally anonymous (true) and if you still don't want it, you can tell them to turn it off and it's done (also true, there's a setting in the box for it).

One final word (to correct a bad assumption): The TiVo Suggestions are computed entirely on your personal TiVo. No TiVo servers are used to compile this info, none of your thumbs ratings for shows are sent back to TiVo for this purpose. It's all local.

From now, before you bash something, learn what's really happening. It's fine to argue in the abstract, but a computer is not abstract, it's a real physical device. It's simpler to actually hack the thing and find the real story.

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