"Not a Mini-Spy"

An Anonymous Coward sent in: "Does a device for audience measurement which "registers what its wearer hears every minute of the day" bother anybody else?" I hope they get paid well for wearing these.

Comments

Reminds me of a nature show

[Croaker]

Does this strike anyone as being eerily like the way naturalists will shoot a tranq into some hapless animal and saddle them with a bigass ugly collar around their neck containing a radio reciever?

"Welcome to PBS. Next on Nature, stalking the wild European consumer..."

Beyond objective observation

[wirefarm]

Several people have pointed out that a knowing participant cannot give unbiased, impartial data.
Since all of us casual observers know this, It must have occurred to the demographics companies ages ago -
I wonder how many of them have tried intrusive, illegal surveillance of unsuspecting consumers to gather their data.

First, they'd have to identify their target as being 'average' from all outward appearances. Then they hire an undercover team to monitor every move, every purchase, every magazine ad glanced at for more than a second.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems - here you were, worrying about browser cookies, when some guy who looks like Jean Reno (not Janet Reno, but the guy from that Nat Portman flick, "The Professional",) is lurking in your bushes and going through your trash, seeing if you clip coupons for nasal spray, or buy suspicious amounts of hand lotion...

I suppose there is only one defense - Obfuscate the data! If you think you may be observed, start radically changing your behaviour. If you see an ad for soup on TV, snap into a rain-man-zombie-like state and go directly to the store and buy up 12 cans, all the while chanting "Soup is good food, Soup is good food..." (Better if it's like two in the morning...)
The next day, react violently to the print version of the same ad - scratch out the eyes of all the people in the ad...

That should get them to stop following you.

I'd better go look at ZDNet for a while, to through them off track...

Cheers,
Jim, paranoid in Tokyo


MMDC.NET

Re:I must be dumb.

[Mr. Slippery]

Is it catching an inaudible identifier in the radio signal and making a little electro-note of it?

Yes, if it's the same device described in this Balitmore City Paper story.

...The PPM ["Portable People Meter"] works by detecting an inaudible code that can be embedded in any broadcast signal. Fifty-four radio and TV stations in the Philadelphia market are already including such codes in their broadcasts or are capable of doing so, and Arbitron hopes to have more than 70 signed up by the time the test gets under way. By the end of February, there will be 300 meters in use in Wilmington, Del., which Arbitron considers part of the Philly market. That number will be expanded to 1,500 throughout the greater Philadelphia area by the end of the year, company spokesperson Thom Mocarsky says.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

What about bedroom activity?

[tommck]

So, If I'm putting the stones to some chick.. is this thing going to rate my performance too?
"Well, she was really moaning loud there... but it sounded kinda fake... We'll give him a 5.5"

I bet it works something like this

[scotay]

Arbitron has already tested their Personal People Meter in Philly. It included a motion detector to make sure you are wearing it and relied on signals embedded in the radio/tv broadcasts to determine what you were 'watching'. Sounds like Neilson's got similar technology in a watch.

You forgot to mention: It's voluntary

[ShaunC]

Although the article makes it fairly clear, the blurb here skips by it. These wristwatches aren't some government's new plan to keep tabs on naysayers, and as far as I can tell, they don't even record anything. They're given out by Nielsen to voluntary participants... Just like those crazy thingamajigs that hook up to your cable box, to see which channels you watch and how long you watch them. Nielsen doesn't record-and-store the porno videos you pop in late at night, the dongle just keeps track of which cable channels you're flipping to.

Even still, I can't envision a whole lot of people who would be willing to wear these, at least not in the US. The article mentions over 22K Swiss folks wear the thing, seems a bit much. IIRC Nielsen doesn't pay you to participate in the cable ratings program; instead you're just supposed to be honored that they've chosen you. The article doesn't mention any compensation for sporting the "listening watch," so I doubt there's money involved.

Supposedly "Its inbuilt computer then identifies from which radio or television program the sound is coming," but that's a longshot if you ask me. Some stations broadcast their call letters or station name embedded into their programming (if you have a fairly new car stereo, you've probably seen how it displays, say, "ROCK 103" instead of "102.7"). But unless all stations start doing this, I don't see how it's possible for the watch to automagically tie a sound to a station.

Anyone have a photo of one of these puppies?

Shaun

More accurate radio ratings...? Maybe...

[hillct]

Yah. Read the article before commmenting. It's a ratings gathering tool, loaned to the user if they choose to help ACNeilson.
My question is, "will this actually improvethe accuracy of music ratings and perhaps allow artists to recieve the residuals they actually deserve?". There is a Vary good article about the music ratings system, used to determine royalties paid to artists based on the frequency of broadcast of their work on the radio. Will ASCAP and/or BMI adopt this sort of a strategy to do their information gathering? It would be vary promising for such an application. A quick summary of the article I mentioned:

ASCAP tapes over 60,000 hours of radio airplay in order to identify the music played and on that basis, distributes a percentage of the license fees collected from radio stations and other performance venues, to the artists who's music appears most frequently in the sampled material, in the percentages associated with that performance frequency.

It seems that the neilson system could be applied here to much more cost effectively and accurately measure music performance frequency, and doll out royalty fees more fairly.

--CTH

--

Reminded of Brin's "Earth"

[localroger]

David Brin constructed a future in his novel Earth wherein nearly everyone wore continuously-recording TV camera/VCR "glasses" all the time, and privacy was considered vaguely obscene. While I can see the usefulness of this device from the standpoint of the ratings biz, it's a bit surprising to see it casually accepted by end-user snoopees.

I can see the events reconstructed by one of these watches...

• 7:30 PM radio WRNO (car)
• 8:15 PM disc jockey at Club Vinyl
• 8:47 PM conversation with female acquaintance
• 9:05 PM radio WRNO (car) and conversation
• 10:15 PM Bolero from CD
• 10:27 PM watch taken off

Hmmmm, I wonder if it keeps listening after you take it off too...

I had one...

[emn-slashdot]

I had one until about a month ago. I was rather disturbed by the fact that several parts on the inside had microdot versions of the DMCA on it, and one chip said property of the NSA...

but perhaps I'm just being paranoid.


-EvilMonkeyNinja
a.k.a. Joseph Nicholas Yarbrough
Security Grunt by Day
Programmer by Night