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TiVo Selling Data on Users' Watching Habits
Gyppo writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that TiVo is collecting and selling data on what parts of broadcasts people are rewinding for review and what commercials they are skipping. The data collection is part of a service the company provides to advertisers and television networks, collecting anonymous data on their users' commercial-watching habits. The data they provide is a random subset of their overall userbase, detailing which commercials are skipped and which are actually watched. The article mentions the possibility for privacy abuse, but with this application of technology Tivo is not providing access to what any one individual user watches via the service."
The people you refer to are mere consumers, hogs who eat whatever you throw them. Advertising and marketing companies, these are the gods who must be served, for they are the source of all that is good in the world!
I think it is a legitimate point to think that Tivo might wish to consider putting its retail customers first, since without them they are nothing.
How would their actions be different depending on which customer they put first? Selling that data does not affect the viewers at all.
The attempts to monitize their customers as if they are an asset owned by Tivo seems like a good way to alienate retail customers and to potentially hurt Tivo sales.
The more money TiVo makes from other sources, the lower they can move their prices for everyone else (perhaps even free, if the data was valuable enough). Consumers like low prices more than they like TiVo not selling ANONYMOUS data for some ridiculous notion of ethics.
It's their data, exactly as if a painter kept track of what colors he paints houses and sold that information to a painting company so they know what colors are popular.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Guess what? Myth boxes don't do this.
Weird!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.