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Microsoft Watching What You Watch
Arkham writes "According to this Wired article, Microsoft
has contracted with a company called Predictive Networks to track the viewing habits of Microsoft TV devices. The Predictive software creates a "Digital Silhouette" that is described as being able "to tell them that Joe watches a lot of baseball, likes Situation Comedies, and
responds favorably to commercials that use humor."." I've always said
that I'm cool with my Tivo tracking what I watch, provided it never tells
anyone my name and address to anyone.
If it meant I watched more
targetted advertisements, I'd fast forward less.
If I see a big face wearing glasses show up on my TV I'm chucking a hammer through it!
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
...Web sites across the Internet are tracking which ad banners you see and click on by using a sophisticated "cookie" file.
This article would be "news" if we weren't already familiar with the technology, I think.
I understand that companies are trying to gain as much data as possible on the population. But at what point does this become intrusive?? You know what I watch on TV, You know where I shop, You know what Prescriptions I take, You know what Web Sites I go to. Is there such a thing as privacy anymore???
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. RUSH
There are some good uses of this sort of technology as well, beyond targetted adverts. Being able to draw on what other people like to watch to suggest things to see, for example. If I like programs A and B, and the vast majority of people who also like them like program C as well, the system should be recommending that I try it. A step forward from the single-user service that TiVo offers.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
People that actually buy Microsoft TV devices? Middle aged men, that like expensive toys. Looks like ratings for porn, sports, and the Man show are going to sky rocket...
I think it's a given that any set-top box that you buy today (TiVo, ReplayTV, anything by Microsoft) is likely going to track viewing habits and use that data for market research. I'm not 100% against the concept--if it means that there will be more shows that I actually like, I think it's a good thing. What we have to worry about is when the media line is crossed, where the data is used to target you for direct mailings, telemarketers, spam even.
Imagine you are watching TV, and you watch a lot of National Geographic. Suddenly, you find yourself getting magazine subscription requests in the mail, telephone calls from NG about becoming a member, and e-mail in your Inbox about the Web site, all just from watching TV. This is something we need to remain vigilant about, that the companies don't use the data they collect in an all-out attempt to sell us their wares (no pun intended).
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
On Sky Digital TV in the UK, there are advertisments that carry an on screen reminder to 'click now' for a free sample. Clicking takes you to an advertiser's page that can then connect through your phone line to send your address details.
To step up to 'buy now' functions isn't that much of a stretch of the imagination.
The Predictive software creates a "Digital Silhouette" that is described as being able "to tell them that Joe watches a lot of baseball, likes Situation Comedies, and responds favorably to commercials that use humor/
How in the hell does it know how he responds to the humorous commercials? Hopefully they just know that he doesn't change the channel away from them, and that they don't actually know his response somehow....
~ now you know
pronoblem
I think privacy went out the window a long time ago with marketing, but we have to consider that our privacy has two parts: our unique life, and our generalized interaction with this world. If you look at my mail, I bet you could guess that I work on computers. That's fine as far as I'm concerned, and I think privacy on a large scale is still very much in tact. Microsoft doesn't care that I went to Meijer this morning for coffee, and that it was exactly 3.5 miles from my house, and that I walked about 20 steps to get into my place. That's my privacy!!! Not the fact that I work in computers. Yes I would like less junk mail... no I do not want my government records available for download, but as far as everything else, I accept that this is what drives the money around.
I think they said it can create a 'profile' based on remote control usage, so it the remote is doing a lot of channel surfing and stops at a particular show and some ad, it can record that "user 1 likes such-and-such", then another user may only change channels between shows or whatever and records what on during that useage pattern. Kinda like analyzing how different people type to distinguish who's at the keyboard, a hunt-and-pecker or a speed typist - then they can record what content is being typed for two different users even tho they don't id by logging in, retina scan or whatever.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Is it just me, or are more people getting a very strong "1984" vibe here? I already saw myself at my Linux box, just hacking away merrily when the voice of Big Brother Bill came out of the tv... and then I woke up screaming...
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
> So how does it intend to find out that Joe responds to commercials?
By the surprisingly easy method of channel monitoring. It's been shown time and again that if a commercial is uninteresting, people will surf around to other channels, then come back when they think the show is back on. This behavior is also what drives the short-long method, where the first commercial break in a show is short (two or three ads) then the next is longer, and the network can charge more for the ones in the middle of the long set, since they have a higher "hit position" than the ones in the beginning. So, the device simply monitors which commercials keep Joe from changing the channel, and then looks for trends in those commercials to see what themes keep his hands off the remote.
And you thought this was simple? Networks spend millions learning stuff like this.
Virg
The more I watch the news, especially since September 11, the more I realize there is very little new information dispersed to the masses. Instead I see people waving signs, but no mention is given to their history or how those signs were written in English. News, more and more I think, just tells us mostly what we want to hear or think we would hear.
It seems to me that one of the primary purposes of advertising is to sell you things you didn't know you needed. So if advertising is so targeted that the commercials and products only reflect ones already forged tastes, then how does that help to sell more widgets? Like the news, this sounds like a way to sell us what we already know about or what we already want, and doesn't seem to lend itself to increasing sales or opening new markets.
consider, say I watch a lot of p0rn when my wife and/or girlfriend is away or goes to bed early, and my wife suddenly wonders why all the targetted TV ads are for sex chatlines and hot hard action......
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Tin foil helmet firmly on...
Police forces and intelligence agencies currently use psychological profiling when trying to hunt down serial killers, terrorists, etc.
Imagine a profile suggested the criminal in question would probably respond "favorably to commercials that use humor". Do you think that Microsoft has done a deal with the FBI to share the data they get from this?
Are we going to have to start to worry about our profiles if we start watching too many violent films or are obsessive fans of the X-Files?
I can't get too worked up about this... as long as the consumer knows when he buys a Microsoft TV product that it 'comes with' this kind of monitoring. That, to me, is the key -- full and open disclosure, and a consumer educated enough to know what that means.
Really, if you have a Yahoo 'home page' configured, you're already providing information about your preferences -- voluntarily -- albeit on a lesser scale then what MS TV will do.
If you use one of those 'shopper discount' grocery store cards, you're also providing this kind of information, in even greater detail. If you purchased a pregnancy test or jock-itch ointment last week, it's in a database somewhere if you use one of those cards, and the fact that they don't individually target you NOW for marketing based on this information doesn't mean they won't in the future.
From the above article: "...61 percent of retailers surveyed either have or plan to have frequent-shopper programs. Already, more than a quarter of all supermarket sales are tracked with the cards."
That shopper discount card sounds much like what MS TV plans:
"Scott Oddo, director of research at Predictive Networks, said the collected information does not connect viewers' interests to their names or other personally identifiable information."
It's not like some kind of database where the Evil Goons at Microsoft can look up exactly what you were doing minute-by-minute every day of your life now is it?
Systems like this already exist in other areas - think of the loyalty cards that many shops now run for instance. In fact, loyalty cards store more detailed information than this system does.
I for one don't oppose the idea of having a TV that didn't show be some of the quite incredible amounts of crap that I would never want to watch. I don't much like adverts either, but if I have to watch them I'd rather see relevant ones than more pointless rubbish about stuff that I can't even use.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
M$ Maketeer#1 Joe watches a lot of baseball, likes Situation Comedies, and responds favorably to commercials that use humor.
M$ Maketeer#2 He sounds like our kind of brain-dead moron.
M$ Maketeer#1 Send him a brochure.
Ummm, I would highly suggest that you do a little refresher from Econ 101, and don't think so highly of yourself. The companies couldn't care less about you personally in terms of pricing. You are just one of several million customers. The price of their goods is easily summed up in one sentace:
Charge the price that maximizes profits.
It's really that simple. As you raise your price, you sell less, as you lower it you sell more. Each and every person has a different threshold for when and how much they buy (and it varies day by day). So the job of a company is to find the price point that maximizes profit. If you sell too cheap, ya you sell a lot, but it doesn't make up for cost. If you sell to expensive you make more per unit but don't sell enough units.
Well because the objective of companies is to make the most money, the price that they seek is the one at which all the costs and profits balance the best, and they make the most profit. Now of course there are other factors like when competitors get into price wars and such, but all other things being equal, a comapny is going to charge the price where they make the most profit.
Now they don't need any kind of special traking cards to determine this price, inventory control can tell you this. You charge a buck, you sell X many units/wekk. YOu rase the price toa buck and a quarter and now you only sell Y many. Then you just do the math, and figure out where you make the most money.
They care about your data for reasons of marketing and such, not pricing. The methods for figuring that out are very, very old.
Next thing you know, my 79 cent loaf costs $1.39 and I'm supposed to feel lucky when they sometimes offer a special membership price of $1.10. Uh huh.
If we assume that:
A) every company is out there to maximize their profits, and that the best way to maximize those profits is to balance margin (markup) with # of units sold,
and
B) in a proper implementation of such "tracking", every company in a given industry (in this example, a grocery store / supermarket would track ALL products, not just those of a certain brand) would take advantage of such technology,
then one would assume that the technology would be used to find the "best" pricepoint for every product. Best being defined as the point at which raising the price hurts unit sales to the point that net profits go down, and lowering the price does not increase the nunmber of units sold, but detracts from profits. A BBA-type can probably tell us the proper terminology for this, but I think its a simple concept.
Let us assume that, on our way to buy groceries tomorrow morning, instead of walking into our normal grocery store, we walked into a store with a solid tracking system. Every item in the store would be effectively priced and positioned - nothing would be "overpriced" for the effects of overpricing would be noted and corrected for. True, nothing would be underpriced either, but (and here's the contentious part of my post)... would we really be paying more on our grocery bill? How many times do you look at a product and think to yourself "if this was x dollars cheaper, they would sell TONS of these!"
Of course, if the grocery store sells only one brand of stuff, and/or there is only one grocery store in town, (ie monopoly) then the whole theory gets ugly, quickly. But assuming that grocery stores remain grocery stores, and they compete, and carry many different brands, then tracking would produce a net benefit for the consumer.
Of course, all of this tracking (grocery store concept) doesn't really need to be tied to an individial identity, but there are other benefits to that. All I am suggesting is that shopping at a place where our purchases are tracked has the potential, though healthy competition, to serve us in the long run, by killing off the inferior products and effectively pricing the good ones.
I just wish some of the restaurants around here (I live in Antigua, in the Caribbean) would grasp the concept that, in times of tourism downturn, restaurants would grasp that if they didnt charge $30USD for their entrees, they wouldn't sit empty, and that lowering their prices would result in an INCREASE in profits... but I digress)
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
Hmm, if that's true, explain to me how the price of a loaf of bread at this chain has a different price at each outlet in each city. Hmmm, the same chain stores 5 miles apart charge different prices. Hmmmmm. They know the demographics of the people coming into each individual store and they know their specific spending habits at the stores. Hmmmmmm.
No duh. I don't think they care about me specifically. They track us as a group and determine how to manipulate prices that way. I just refuse to be part of the group being tracked.
It's not so much that it's been done before, it's being done by one that is troubling. Then you get data mining where all those innocent little bits of information about you are collected, analyzed, and determinations made about you.
My guess is, the only ones left defending Microsoft at that point will be the Microsoft plants. I wonder how close we are to that being the case now...
However, there's a reason why I actually like Tivo's data collection. I think Taco's dreaming a bit as far as actual targeted ads go (at least for now), but there's a more important benefit: Aggregate viewing statistics are more or less what're commonly referred to as "ratings". Ratings determine whether shows live or die. They determine how much many a network gets from a show's advertisers. This, in turn, determines how much money goes into a show's budget. It should be obvious why having my viewing habits correlate with TV studio's spending is A Good Thing.
To provide a slightly more concrete example, however, I give you "Family Guy". It's a funny show, it has a decent geek following, and it runs in a time-slot that's otherwise dominated by stupid reality TV. The network it's on, Fox, keeps playing the stupid game of repeatedly cancelling the show and then bringing it back. Apparently, they decided that last week's ratings were going to decide whether or not they cancel the show yet again. I recorded the show on my Tivo and watched it. Assuming that Fox subscribes to Tivo's viewer information, that's one more vote in the "Keep it on the air, dammit" column. Even better, given that viewer statistics are collected from a relatively small portion of the viewing public, it's a disproportionately large vote.
Hi!
You may well have seen a grocery store chain experiment with prices--that's a practice that's been going on for decades. (Grocery stores routinely change different prices in different neighborhoods--a few cents more in rich neighborhoods (where consumers will pay more for convenience) and a few cents less in poor neighborhoods (where consumers may be more price-sensitive). The "frequent shopper" card systems won't really impact that--grocery stores can map price/demand (elasticity) curves already.
What the frequent shopper programs do is help the stores manage what products get displayed, how they get displayed, and how they are priced. They do this by identifying the "core customers"--both of the chain, and of that particular store.
Most consumers purchase most of their groceries at one particular store. They might shop at a different store (it's adjacent to your child's school, so you can stop in on your way to work) occasionally, but that big hundred-bucks-a-week trip usually happens the same place. By offering lower prices on selected items, the stores entice the frequent shopper to sign up for the card, and permit his shopping habits to be tracked. While this offers the theoretical possibility of monitoring the customer (we get our prescription drugs at the grocery store--if I start getting scrips filled for AZT, does that mean I have AIDS?), it offers the immediate opportunity of selling coupons to advertisers. (To wit: I buy dog food--even when I am not buying dog food in that particular trip, I almost always get a dog food coupon at the register.)
The real advantage of a frequent shopping card, though, is identifying the buying habits--in the aggregate--of the store's core buyers. It helps enormously in making "plan-o-gram" decisions: how much of what to stock where. Example: last week the deli ran out of salmon four days running. Should we increase our daily order of salmon? Well--if our data shows that most of that salmon was bought by frequent shoppers, the answer is obviously yes--these are customers who will likely be back for more seafood. On the other hand, if very few of our frequent shoppers bought that salmon, it might be wise to wait--we may have had a statistical cluster of salmon-swallowing tourists in the neighborhood. In a similar way, we can identify whether our core customers buy more of our store brands or the name brands for particular products. We may find differences between this behavior in different stores: in stores where our brands do better, we give those brands more space; where our core customers prefer the name brands, we give the name brands more shelf space. In any case, we tailor the shelf space in each store to focus on the product mix favored by the frequent shoppers in that store--that may mean more salmon in some stores, and more produce in others. (Real live example: there is a chain grocery store in Morrisville, Vermont--a tiny town thirty miles from the Canadian border--that has five different varieties of fresh mushrooms in the produce section on any given day. Why? Because their core customers like mushrooms. [Real Vermonters might suggest that this store caters to quiche-eating flatlanders, and offer this as proof, but I digress....)
In the example that you cite:
The store might test different prices to determine your resistance to a price increase (this is called "elasticity" by economists--elasticity is to Econ majors as pointers are to CS majors: if you don't get the concept, you tend to go find another major). If you're going to buy French bread, and you're willing to pay $1.39, that's the price. The frequent shopper cards may help in letting the store measure price resistance among the core shoppers (that is, if 80% of the store's french bread is sold to frequent shopper cardholders, and they demonstrate a near-horizontal elasticity curve [change the price, they don't care] then the store can safely hike the price of french bread). But stores have measured elasticity like this, as I wrote above, for decades--all the frequent shopper cards do is let them measure price resistance more accurately.
John Murdoch
Which means, yes, that I don't like marketing. In the final analysis, while I agree we can never eradicate the marketing/promotion/advertising sector of our economy, I think that it's clearly bloated and that, more importantly, it is not, as a whole, serving the needs of the larger society.
In particular, it is not good for us to have people observe what we do, and then try and configure our cultural environment, which is a huge part of what constructs our consciousness, as adults as well as as children, in order to get us to part with our money.
I don't want people to find out that I'm an (act surprised) environmentalist, and that start spinning every malarky under the sun as being environmental (Dow-corning hugs trees!) I don't want people tracking my eating habits and advertising junk food when my blood sugar is low. Even if the targeted advertisements aren't 1) lies or 2) promoting an action which is detrimonious to my health or well-being, I don't want them to be tailored in such a fashion that I am less likely to just tune them out.
Why do I care? Because, even though I don't view myself as especially vulnerable to advertisements, my thoughts and ideas can still be affected by the things, and if real scientific cleverness is applied to the question of "how can we find out what sort of ad this demographic group will respond to?", then, well, damn, they'll come up with ads that more people in my cohort will respond to. Even if those ads don't succeed in selling me more stuff, I think that the advertisers will successfully identify things that make those ads poison my thought processes for a longer time.
Let me say also that most justifications that people come up with for having an advertising sector to the economy at all are blatantly self serving.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Bingo! The article was made to make sure you know and have a valid reference, not to get your worked up. Most people who read Slashdot knew that M$ would be doing this. Now we have a place to point because the brazen bitches have admitted what they are going to do. Don't look to M$ to make anyone aware of what they will do with the information. 99.99% (If they manage to sell 10,000, heh!) of people who buy this will have no idea.
Strangely enough, this is much closer to the grocery store card than you might think. I've never, ever seen a grocery store card contract that says, "we will collect infomation on your buying habbits to sell to advertisers, the FBI or anyone else who will pay, and the information will be passed on to creditors in case of chapter 11 filing by this company." I have, however, lived in a place where there were NO grocery stores that did not REQUIRE one of their stupid cards to buy groceries with a check. "Security" against bad checks is the only reason I've ever heard. The alternatives were to carry cash (inconvienent) or use a credit card (even more invasive).
What these companies are abusing is your image for comercial gain without your consent. While a collection of buying habbits, credit records and contact information may not look like a photograph or other traditional likeness, it is a model of your person. Just like that photograph, it is built entirely at the expense of the abuser. In the US, at least, use of your image for comercial purposes without express written consent is against the law.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Marketing would dearly love to know what you watch and what buttons you click to get there and when you change channels and all of that. For at least the large majority of subscribers, they certainly don't know it now. Cable network ratings come from the same Nielson household monitoring service that over-the-air ratings do.
As noted, if you hook the coax straight into the TV, or if you have a typical analog cable box, there is no return path for usage data, even if the devices were collecting it, which they are not.
If you have a current generation digital box there is a return path, but none of (a) the software in the box, (b) the bandwidth available in the return path or (c) the systems receiving data from the STB is geared to handle the volume of data that channel changes and viewing patterns would require be transmitted.
Advanced STBs with built-in cable modems may be capable of recording and transmitting such data in the future. At least some of us technology folks at the cable company are worried about the privacy concerns of doing so.