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TiVo To Sell Customer Data
camusflage writes "Yahoo has a story that details TiVo's plans to sell customer data to advertisers and broadcasters. While individuals will be anonymous, data will be made available in aggregate form, including ZIP code. The San Jose Mercury News has additional coverage on the news."
Finally they might give me the pr0n-commercials and ads I've been waiting for!
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
news flash, einstein:
NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR VIEWING HABITS.
take off your tin-foil hat now.
BilldaCat
The more junk mail we get, the better -- we can line all the cages and not feel guilty about wasting paper!
And why do we have Tivo in the store?
Animal Planet, baby!!! :-)
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Now mass marketers will think I'm Gay.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Imagine if you could change the information sent to Tivo so the advertisers thought young teenagers watched "The 700 Club" and retired senior citizens watched MTV. Soon Depends undergarments will advertise during TRL and Trojan condoms will be blasting its ads to conservative republicans. That would be dope.
Just set your box to record lots of stuff that you want "THEM" to think you watch during the night or when you're not at home and there's nothing else that you care about. That way, your pr0n habits will seem like more of a statistical aberration.
John
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
I cannot post this as anything other than an AC.
I was a TiVo engineer back in the 90's.
In early 1999, TiVo started to include a specialized signal in the colour synchronization signal of their programming guide. This signal, when downconverted to VLF (Very Low Frequency) audio are proven to be subliminal messages.
Messages such as "Flush the toilet" were tested. Our sources at various city waterworks confirmed that water consumption spiked dramatically when this test message was played.
In November or December of 1999 some of the test messages promoted purchasing, just in time for the holiday gift season. Records from the time will show an above average sales season.
Then in May 2000, after all the Y2K nonsense had gone away, a disgruntled engineer locked the system into a continuous loop. We've been unable to break into the system yet to disable the message. However, the message says "Go to Goatse.cx . Being that slashdot has a higher than normal amount of TiVo users, it comes as no suprise that this link is commonplace.
Do not succumb to goatse.cx! You have been programmed
Heck, less than that. Web server -statistics-, post amalgamating and tabulating.
;)
So they can tell that three thousand people in your zip code watched American Idol... they're not going to be able to conclusively proove *you* have no taste.
Hopefully if they can sustain enough income from this, they can drop their monthly fee
Right.... and monkeys will fly out of my butt. And hell? That's right. Frozen over.
Best Windows Freeware
we can have more quality geek TV
And that would be... what, exactly?
I missed a meeting, tell me what I'm supposed to be watching in order to keep my membership card.
Nothing other than their privacy policy. Doing demographics has _ALWAYS_ been included in Tivo's privacy policy, and you have _ALWAYS_ been able to opt out, if you want.
/. world have said, why not view this as an oppoptunity to influence the market? Maybe enough people's habbits will kill these idiotic reality shows.
Besides, as many people in the non
Partridge Family fan and then I'll be a target for the next layoff and then I'll be laid off and then I'll lose my house and then my wife will leave me and then I'll get beat up at the rescue mission over a bottle of MD20-20 and then they'll put impants in my brain at the emergency room and then the CIA will transmit orders to me through PBS and then I'll have to wear aluminum foil on my head all the time and then that won't matter because while I am laying in the gutter on skid row George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will send a UFO to abduct me and then I'll get probed (ouch) and then the aliens will clone me and then the clone will take over my old life and then I'll be a slave in the methane mines on Altair IV and then I'll get spaced by a slorg monster and then I'll die. All because of Tivo.
(I posted this to Usenet a while back, but since the privacy hysteria is starting again, I thought I would outline the threat as seen by some.)
*sigh*
...
Well, you asked for it
YO' MAMA IS SO FAT:
Her high school graduation picture was an aerial photograph.
Her driver's license says "Picture continued on other side."
She has to iron her pants on the driveway.
The back of her neck looks like a pack of hot dogs.
Yo mama's so fat, all the restaurants in town have signs that say: "Maximum Occupancy: 240 Patrons OR Yo Mama"
Yo mama's so fat, when she ran away, they had to use all four sides of the milk carton.
Yo mama's so fat, instead of Levis 501 jeans, she wears Levi's 1002's.
Yo mama's so fat, when she gets in an elevator, it HAS to go down.
When she haul ass she gotta make two trips.
When she dances she makes the band skip.
When she was diagnosed with the flesh eating disease the doctor gave her 18 years to live.
She put mayonnaise on aspirin.
She jumped for joy and got stuck.
She shows up on radar.
She stood in front of the Hollywood sign and it just said H d.
And my favorite:
Yo mama's so fat, when she went to the beach Greenpeace tried to drag her ass back in the water.
Hmm.. Targetted ads *might* be good. But they might also be a bad thing sometimes.
Scenario 1: Tivo sends you (a young guy) ads about beer, SUVs, and Levi's jeans. It sends the woman in the apartment down the hall ads for women's clothing.
Scenario 2: Because of interesting purchases, viewing habits, whatever on your part, it sends you ads for women's clothing.
Scenario 3: For the same reason, it sends you those same ads, and your buds come over to watch the football game on your bigscreen TV. *Insert awkward pause in conversation here*.
Targetted ads sound a-ok on the surface, but sometimes, it's nice to be anonymous.
If the TiVo viewing data really gets distributed there will be MUCH better ratings for /. TV like Star Trek(s), Red Dwarf, Blackadder, The Office, Buffy,... and the stuff on TechTV and the Sci-Fi channel.
Nerd viewing habits will be a force to be reckoned with.
Don't write letters to networks and advertisers - VOTE for your favorite shows with your TiVo!
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
Not so sure the Tivo data is worth much.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
"96.3 percent of our subscribers skip commercials."
Oops.
paintball
Yeah, the trouble is that _everyone_ over generalizes.
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