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."

Comments

pr0n

[Jukeb0x]

Finally they might give me the pr0n-commercials and ads I've been waiting for!

Re:Key word: aggregate

[ryants]

Unless there's a ZIP code in Wyoming with only one person

Insert "yo mamma so fat..." joke here.

Re:Wow

[BilldaCat]

news flash, einstein:

NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR VIEWING HABITS.

take off your tin-foil hat now.

oh great

[Lxy]

Now mass marketers will think I'm Gay.

Funny hack opportunities

[Big Toe]

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.

And if this bothers you...

[johnnick]

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

Re:Wow

[RollingThunder]

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. ;)

Re:Good for them...

[L. VeGas]

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.

Re:Why not?

[RobotRunAmok]

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.

Re:Key word: aggregate

[dreamt]

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.

Besides, as many people in the non /. 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.

How Tivo Ruined my life - A potentially true story

[ethaz]

See, they could get the radius server logs from UUNet and then check the time of the call and compare it with logs received at that time and look for the secret code embedded in the logs [they deny it but I know it's there] and then compare it to the wiretaps from Echelon and then run the whole thing through the NSA supercomputer and then they'll know that I watched the Brady Bunch and then my boss will know [because he gets a secret report on me from the NSA] and then I'll be passed over for promotion because he is a
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.)

Re:Focused Advertising

[Jester99]

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.

Re:Good for us

[netringer]

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!

Customer data? Damn straight

[CausticWindow]

Anybody remember this:

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.

The big deal is TiVo suicide.

[raehl]

"96.3 percent of our subscribers skip commercials."

Oops.

Re:Demographics are not an invasion of privacy.

[rthille]

Yeah, the trouble is that _everyone_ over generalizes.