TiVo Watches the Super Bowl

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."

Comments

TiVo *keystroke* logs you, too

[InterruptDescriptorT]

This was incredibly disturbing.

I recently found online a set of backdoors that can be enabled on the TiVo through the 'Select A Program To Record' mode. Check out tivocommunity.com and search for backdoors.

By enabling backdoors, one of the options allows you to display TiVo's logs on the TV screen. While this is pretty benign information, including things like the status of the scheduler and the daily PPP outcall status, one of the log files appears to be every remote control action you perform with the TiVo controller. I shit you not. From what I remember, the first field is the timestamp, and other field indicate TiVo mode, channel, and various sundry associated with the IR event. Even more scary is that things like volume up and volume down are logged, along with a very precise timestamp. Correlate that to a music show on MTV, and bam--TiVo instantly knows you like the new *NSync or Britney song.

If this were solely used for diagnostic purposes, it would not be so bad, except that TiVo acknowledges that they zip the log files and upload to TiVo as part of the daily call it makes to update its program information.

I urge everyone with a TiVo to contact Philips about this matter and tell them that you don't agree to this or abide by the sending of these longs. Furthermore, if you can hack your TiVo to get the Bash prompt (again, see the link above), I'd set something up to wipe that log before the daily call. This is an absolutely scary invasion of my privacy, and though I love my TiVo, I love my privacy much, much more.

Re:The data mining level is pretty astonishing

[CerebusUS]

oh wake up.

Have you read anything at all about TiVo besides the paranoid ramblings of various slashdotters?

IMHO the whole point of a Tivo is data collection hence right from the start the units have been designed as profiling devices capturing all available statistical data

Duh. TiVo said they would use this data for marketing and revenue purposes RIGHT FROM THE START. This isn't a big secret. They also allow you to opt out of the service!

the sooner people complain and see these companies for what they really are the better

uh-huh. how insulated is your private information? health records? drivers license info? credit history? and you are worried that someone is going to know you like to watch boobies bounce on tv?

I think Slashdot has finally reached the critical mass of morons

I don't get /. at all.

[InterruptDescriptorT]

This is going to be modded down. Mark my works, but I'm going to say it anyway.

I've been rather upset at all the people defending TiVo because they have an 'opt-out' policy and that their e-mails to their customers update them about changes to the privacy statement. Apparently it doesn't matter that there have been several posts indicating that they send a log of all of the IR messages the TiVo receives correlated to the zip code.

I'm getting the impression that the defence of TiVo is based on the fact that yes, it is cool technology, and if this helps its succeed, then it's OK. It is cool technology. I own a TiVo myself and want to see the PVR revolution continue and strengthen viewers' choices in programming.

But wait a second--if Microsoft was doing something similar in their OS, with their software, the same people praising TiVo would be up in arms. There really is a double standard among most of the /. readership--if the company is OK, then their practices must be. If it's Microsoft or Adobe or the latest bully-of-the-week, it's not. And it frustrates me. We need to be very careful with our privacy information no matter with whom we entrust it.

I urge the /. readership to look carefully at all companies when it comes to privacy and personal information, not only those they want to see taken down a notch, like Microsoft.