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TiVo Watches the Super Bowl

Posted by michael on from the watching-us-watching-them dept.

Boone^ writes: "While millions of people were seeing a tremendous football game, TiVo was busy collecting statistics about the Super Bowl viewing habits of its subscribers. Based on a random sampling of 10,000 of the 280,000 subscribers, they found out that Pepsi/Britney was the subject of the most replayed Ad(s), and not surprisingly the play that got the most attention was Vinatieri's game-winning FG."

2 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Holy Crap by jlower · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You are most welcome to opt-out of this data gathering.

    I leave it on because 1)I believe them when they say they only aggragate the data and 2)It's an important part of their business model and I want them to succeed.

  2. Re:Whoa whoa whoa... by jamie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "You mean that if I go out and get a Tivo, then they can tell exactly what commercials I watch?"

    Yeah. Take a look at this report, which goes into some technical detail about what your TiVo sends back (they watched the modem line as data transferred):

    http://www.privacyfoundation.org/privacywatch/ report.asp?id=62&action=0

    Your TiVo machine basically just sends its syslog home every night, complete with information like this:

    Jan 13 17:42:10 (none) LogTime[94]: WatchTV: change the channel: 0.015 sec
    Jan 13 17:42:55 (none) LogTime[94]: Lineup: update the OSD: 0.949 sec
    Jan 13 17:42:56 (none) LogTime[94]: Lineup: arrow up/down: 0.011 sec

    Except it's transmitted in a form that looks like this:

    980389520|WatchTV|live|IFC|27666|980384400
    980389546|MWEvent|tyTivo
    980389550|MWEvent|tySurfDown

    and of course it's anonymized, traceable only to your zipcode.

    The PrivacyFoundation.org report linked above broke the news that the way the anonymized data is FTP'd up to TiVo's homebase leaves a way that an insider employee (or an unscrupulous, lying company) could potentially correlate your syslog to your name, instead of just your zipcode. I've no idea whether TiVo has changed its practices after the report came out two years ago, but I'm not aware of them having done so.