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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."
And we're shocked that the same male geeks who would actually fork over the money for TiVo enjoyed looking at Britney the most, too!
Clearly the whole point of the survey was for them to say "Hey advertisers! Look! This technology is a GOOD thing for you, not a BAD thing."
Of course, one of the reasons people watch the Superbowl is FOR the ads. I don't think I've ever watched a single ad when fast-forwarding through Battle-Bots.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
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.
TiVo Watches the Super Bowl... ...and horny geeks watch Britney. :)
Actually, this is a little misleading. While I have no doubt that a large number of people watch the game for the ads, the survey is skewered towards TiVO owners, not the Super Bowl watching population at large. While nowhere near the same of importance, it's the same factor that lead to the "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline (the headline was predicted based on a phone survey, one of the first of it's kind. Since few had telephones, except for the rich, the survey skewered towards their tastes, which was for Dewey.)
Beware typoes.
I'd rather like to know how many people fast-forwarded to skip through commercials. I would have!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Tivo owners watch the Super Bowl? But...but...sunlight, outdoors...sports...
I don't know, it doesn't seem right. Shouldn't they be downloading Linux or trying to destroy the WTO or something?
What's this world coming to...
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
I'm with you. Something is kind of spooky when you get a little PPV spice channel and they know how many times you rewound to see the money shot.
If your not cheating your not trying. If your not trying your not winning and if your not winning why play?
I *want* tv companies to know what I like to watch, and advertisers to know that I almost always skip their adverts because they are dull and pointless.
I don't want them to know that the data comes from *me*, but I certainly have no objection to them knowing what is watched so maybe they'll make more programs I like.
This is a *good* thing.
Sig is taking a break!
Does anyone remember the premise of the show? TV Reporters only get to be on-air for as long as people are watching. The networks have big control rooms with real-time statistics of watchers. If the bar graph goes too low, you get pulled. With enough TiVo units, the networks could get the instant feedback they really want. Imagine TV lineups changing weekly, daily, hourly in direct response to viewers desires based on their TiVos. Scary, isn't it?
I think...I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check. -M.C. Escher (1898-1972)
http://www.ifilm.com/superbowl
Although alot of the various companies also have their ads up on their corporate sites
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Just to elaborate on the other responses...
Tivo gave us a VERY detailed message about this... along with a very easy opt-out system. They outlined that the information being collected was purely statistical and would not be linked to an individual user. I thought they handled it well.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
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:
Except it's transmitted in a form that looks like this:
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.
You can opt out of the information gathering at any time. Any information that tivo gets is anonymous, and can't be linked to you.
Tivo is actually very aware of privacy issues. Anytime it makes a change to it's privacy policy, however minor, it sends a email to its subscribers explaining what the change is, and why it was made. You can't say that about many companies.
I don't want to hear it if you a) don't have a Tivo and b) haven't looked into what exact data they collect.
Privacy people tend to get all spazzy on here, and work everyone else up into a tizzy, and in the case of Tivo, its not even remotely warranted.
This sort of thing is what keeps Tivo going. This is a new market and it takes a long time to start breaking even. I have zero problem with Tivo doing this, if it allows me to continue using their service which, frankly, I can't imagine having to do without.
Tivo has been a company that from day one has been extremely concerned about privacy rights, and open communication with their users. If you spend any time browsing the Tivo forums at http://www.tivocommunity.com you'll see that not only do they have a powerful support presense, they are very open about what they collect, how its analyzed, and how its sold. People in the underground community independantly verified what they were saying.
So, basically, everyone relax. Step away from the keyboard, and go unpause Jerry Springer on the Tivo. That's where the real excitement is, not here.
Stop the FUD - you know you can. Anonymous, opt-out, what's the problem?
Jeff
Those backdoors aren't anything new, nor is the knowledge that they log data about viewers viewing habits. Keystroke logging is how they do it. (Its far more accurate -- but keep in mind that Tivo doesn't know, even remotely, what commercials you may or may not be fast forwarding through, so they don't have any useful info about you at all!) Tivo has NEVER hidden the fact. They have been extremely upfront with it in their terms of service and on their website.
Its your own damn fault if you didn't read up on it. But keep in mind before you start calling for some silly protest, that Tivo doesn't correlate information they gleem with who it came from -- only from where they are from, and the provide that data in aggregate to networks who actually *know* what commercials and such were being shown. So if the networks know that 20% of people in 02139 actually stopped to watch the new Volkswagon commercial during a rerun episode of Will and Grace, how does that impact your privacy in the slightest? Volkswagon doesn't know who you are. NBC doesn't know who you are. Tivo doesn't know you were watching a Volkswagon commercial. So where's the problem?
So who's the plastic surgeon then?
Steve M
...who don't get to watch the Superbowl commercials, be sure to check out ifilm.com's Superbowl Page where you can check them out.
I first found out about the since deceased AdCritic by looking for a place to check out the SB commercials, and it looks like these guys have filled that void for me.
For those of you who aren't aware, Canadian cable companies cut out the American commercials and insert our own, unique brand of crap in their place.
At least this year, there was a game worth watching!
$0.02 (CDN)
The actual level of data collected is way more than just what channel you are watching, the data is so specific it can tell how many times and what time you pressed any button on the remote at any time, be it volume control ,pause buttons anything!
This data to advertisers is known as "gold dust"
advertisers could find out things like:
did you watch their advert if so how many times
did you forward or rewind it if so how far
did you cut the volume if so for how long
did you flip channel if so did you flip it back
when you flipped what advert did you see on the other channel
and just about any viewing habit data they choose , and guess what , your paying a subscription for this service so for Tivo this is a win win win situation and must be laughing in their condos on malibu beach.
now this report is rather biased towards privacy and some say the report is flawed blah blah but the actual captured data logs are not.
Now whereas the data is "anonomous" it is linked to subscribers via postcode/zipcode and certainly here in the UK if i give my postcode to some companies they can tell exactly which house iam living in , not totally anonomous, and after all, they only need to know what the "house" is watching as everyone sits down and watches the same program together so individual advert profiling would be irrelavent.
devices like Tivo could work without selling this data to advertisers but the might hand of marketing is pretty good at persuasding poor companies that the financial recompence is worthwhile.
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, i mean what use is recording when i press volume buttons in determining that the simpsons is on and if i would like to watch it ?
the sooner people complain and see these companies for what they really are the better
I wonder what the cost benefit analysis of avoiding these kinds of things would be?
There are so many ways to collect personal data about your habits. People put up with it because
it means they can save money or it provides a
significant convenience.
<off-topic>
Example: Most supermarkets in my area now give
discounts only to holders of their courtesy cards,
rather than by using coupons. For awhile the
clerk would use their card if you didn't have
yours but they've stopped doing that now.
They really want to collect that personal
marketing data on you.
</off-topic>
I don't even have to go to my Tivo to do that. You're posting like you assume I haven't done that before. Backdoors were cool when they first were found two years ago, but they pretty much bring yawns now.
So you want me to go see whats in my log files. Since I'm at work, I can't play with the silly backdoors, but since I know a pretty fair amount about how the Tivo works, I have two options available to me. One, I can log into my Tivo over the web and look at the reports there. Or I can look through the entire MFS database on the Tivo for anything I find suspect. But I've done that before and it got old too. Have you? I'm guessing not, since you seemed so excited about the backdoors.
So that aside, my other option is to just ssh into my Tivo. Easy enough, and I can go and just ftp off the syslog. But you know what? I was doing that a year and a half ago too, and it just isn't that interesting either. I know perfectly well what data gets sent up to Tivo. I know perfectly well that the serial number is used via HTTP basic authentication before data is uploaded or downloaded from Tivo. I also know perfectly well that they have said they do not correlate data with users, and I believe them because in two years I've never had a reason not to, and I've dealt pretty directly with Tivo. I also know that Tivo doesn't have the right information to really find out anything useful about me anyway, since they don't know what was on a channel at a given time anyway!. Want to know what else I know? Having worked with a number of companies in the past that write software for data mining demographic data sources, I can tell you for absolutely certain that the Tivo information isn't within two or three orders of magnitude as damaging to your privacy as the data collected when you go shopping and pay for anything with any tender other than cash. And walk there because you don't have a drivers license or car. And don't own or rent property.
Get real. I can't say you're being paranoid, but you're looking at the world with blinders... things are a whole lot worse than you think, and a whole lot more out of your ability to control than you think. Going after Tivo for what they are doing is just plain silly.
Did anyone fastforward through the game to watch the commercials?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm surprised how strongly some people react to others gathering statistics on what they do. Now, granted this is a private activity, watching tv in your own home. But I think that some people need to get over their self-inflated sense of "privacy" and "anonymity". Privacy is being allowed to go about your business without having your rights infringed upon by the state. Anonymity is a different matter. If you choose to use Tivo, and incredibly neat and useful gadget, you contribute to their ability to gather statistics. There's no invasion of privacy going on here, and try as you might, your "rights" are not being deprived (which I think some people forget in our individualistic society).
Eventually, every (smart) company that grows to serve more than a handful of people has to treat those customers as statistics, even though they may claim to be providing incredibly "personal" service.
Some companies are more sophisticated at using the information at their disposal, and employ teams of data miners to sift through for patterns that'll benefit their business. Others aren't so clever and lose out on those chances.
But in either case, why expect both anonymity *and* privacy? There is no constitutional right to either.
While I agree NOW they will do what they say, in the future who knows. And that is what would have me worried. The problem with data gathering is that data lives on long after the fact. And once it is data it cannot be taken back.
There is absolutely no law (in the US) that deals with how the data can be used. It is only the privacy policy of TiVO that dictates what is done.
Lets take the example of a company like Budweiser saying, "you know I want you to send out the new Budweiser commercial to all those that replayed our commercial". Budweiser then says, "hey to do that we will give you X dollars as compensation for your effort". Will TiVO say no to this? Absolutely not. TiVO is playing nice person now because they need to the data to convince the likes the Budweiser.
So sorry, I would opt out without any legally binding laws or legally binding data expiration laws.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Jeez. Again: NO ONE CARES WHAT YOU ARE INDIVIDUALLY DOING. NOBODY. NOT EVEN YOUR MOM. Go downstairs and ask her if you doubt it.
What do you tink is happening? "Ohhh, look, Johnny Slashdot watched The Man Show and reqound while the girls where on the trampoline. Let's go arrest him!!
Get over yourselves, people.
Amen. This is the same argument I was going for in this thread.
Apparently, this sort of data collection is OK, because TiVos are 'cool' and PVR technology needs to be fostered. I totally agree that they are, but so is Windows Media Player (IMHO). If it sent filenames back to Microsoft of all streams I watched, but let you opt out of it, the same people defending TiVo would be quite literally foaming at the mouth.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
A. you can opt out of data collection if you want (you did read the manual right?)
B. they don't log 'mr. x has watched the slashdot show' they log 'someone in zipcode 1234 has watched the slashdot show'
Oh, and I just "discovered" the other day that some http servers actually these things called refer logs, that not only log your IP and what page you're visiting but where you came from; in some cases being able to detect search engine keywords used to get to that page. Given the fact that they could call up your ISP and request modem and customer information it's possible that they could do a heck of alot more damage than knowing you're a grown man who still watches teletubbies.
(...but since this is slashdot we'll completely ignore anything factual)
- MbM
I think I'll be opting out.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Ifilm has all of them, but in Real format.
The page is here
Brant
Argle. Bargle.