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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."
I'd love to know who they're selling it to, though. Choicepoint comes to mind... and that's a very scary thing, letting prospective employers know what I watch.
Except they're not selling individually identifiable information. What they're selling is aggregate data (eg, 12% of commercial skippers went back and watched the new ad for Colgate). Then again, I shouldn't expect you to know that, since it's only mentioned in the summary...
Do you mean disclosure such as Tivo's privacy policy, which says what data they will collect, and what they will do with it? So I guess you mean this can happen in Canada, since Tivo has told people all along that they'd be collecting this information.
There is nothing to see here. It took less than 30 seconds to find Tivo's policy on viewing habbits data.
This is old news. It is also very easy to opt-out. Just call Tivo customer service (1-877-367-8486) and let them know.
I know that the collective memory of the Slashdot moderators is less than a day, but this story came out during the 2004 Superbowl:8 31222
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/03/1
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Why assume anything, when Tivo spells out exactly what they are doing. Of course, you assumed this information didn't exist, and didn't bother to take the 30 seconds to find it.