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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."
Didn't we know this back when the whole Janet Jackson/Super Bowl thing happened? Maybe this is running today in honor of the anniversary of that.
Thank goodness for my MythTV box.
I don't know if this is the same with standalone TiVos, but my DirecTV TiVo box is always on, and always 'recording' two channels. Which means there's pretty much 24 hours a day of stuff I'm watching without skipping anything, plus stuff I am watching and skipping.
Now, they could be ignoring Live TV, but... then they're ignoring when people watch live TV, which I think would be fairly important to advertisers.
Personally I don't care if TiVo (or DirecTV) collect viewing habits, as long as they remain anonymous. I just don't think it's accurate at all.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
A court just blew the cableTV proprietary platform bundle wide open: TV decoders are now open to outside vendors/deployers, starting July 1, 2007. That means that complete "cable cards" will become much cheaper, and that really cheap HW will send the raw data to PCs to be decoded in SW, which can be F/OSS.
The cable TV network just became a lot more like an internet, and the Internet just became a lot more like a TV network. For those working on it ourselves, anyway.
So when does MythTV make TiVo look like the Web made AOL look?
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make install -not war
As someone who has owned a Tivo since about 6 months after they first came out. I was told from day one that they would collect data anonymously on me IF I did not opt-out. Now, I thought very seriously about this issue at the time. I normally opt-out of this kind of stuff but Tivo is one of the LEADING examples of hacker friendly companies selling consumer electronics products. I decided that I wanted to support their business plan since thanks to their hacker friendly policies I was able to upgrade my tiny 14 hr Tivo to an 80+ hour Tivo by myself. At any time before, now, or in the future Tivo could download code to detect and disable my hacked Tivo but they don't because they think differently than 99% of the other companies out there! I think they deserve some F***ING RESPECT & SUPPORT for being a company that is hacker friendly.
Remember this is not Sony root-kitting your PC, this is Tivo letting you hack the system they sold you. Not only that, I can only think of ONE other company (Garmin for my GPS) that continues to give me both bug fixes and actual enhancements to a product which is so old. I happen to have a lifetime subscription to Tivo, back from day one, when it only cost $150 and the only money they have made off of me since is from this anonymous data that I voluntarily allow them to collect! Tivo astonishingly, given the quality of their product and hacker tolerant policies, still isn't a highly profitable company. Maybe, the other 99% of the companies have it right economically - screw the hackers - but I think we should give credit to those who dare to challenge the established ways of treating customers. Suing your customers and root-kitting their computers is what we should be opposing not collecting anonymous data with full disclosure and an opt-out option.
If you chose to go with MythTV or Freevo instead of TiVo, your hardware cost will probably be much higher than an off-the-shelf TiVo unit. So yes, TiVo customers have "forked over cash" but they probably forked over less cash than they would have for an alternative system.
As for the subscription price being "over inflated": $13 per month is just under $.45 per day. Is 2 quarters a day really an over-inflated price for a service that automates recording my favorite shows and allows me to fast-forward commercials that I don't want to watch? (Usage data will reveal that I tend to watch the Geico "cavemen" commercials.) Yes, that's infinite magnitudes more expensive than a free service like XMLTV but realistically it's not a horribly expensive amount to pay. If you can't spare $.45/day then you probably can't afford a PVR to begin with.
Yes, I'm a TiVo user and I'm quite content with the service and the price. At the end of the day I don't care if they look at my usage habits because I hope that the companies will finally realize which ads suck-ass. If the big-brother syndrome gets to the point where someday a company won't hire me because The Great Database says I watched too much Aqua Teen and not enough CSPAN... I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
The counter-argument to that (not one I subscribe to, just advocating the devil) is that you're censoring yourself because people are not, or may not be, respecting your privacy. For example, if you know that your next-door neighbors love spy gadgets - especially their parabolic microphone - then you may not say what you really think of them on your own property, for fear that they'll hear and go Bakersfield Chimp on you.
Personally, I'm in favor of Tivo going this route for the simple fact that it's extremely unlikely I'll ever be hooked up to Nielsen's TV rating service and I'd like for TV networks to base their decisions on the largest sample set possible. For example, maybe a huge portion of people with Tivos watch Battlestar Galactica but, in a statistical fluke, almost nobody who has a Nielsen hookup does. In that situation, if Tivo doesn't sell their data to NBC/Universal, maybe BSG gets cancelled when as few as 100,000 more viewers - represented by the addition of Tivo's data - could have saved the show.