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."

Comments

Re:1st

[eneville]

friss piist you failed it

Titan TV too?

[Mspangler]

Elgato's eyetv uses titan TV to schedule recordings. So when I click on the record button, not only do they send the "record this" information back to my mac mini, they also have a clicks worth of information to sell. Much more reliable than a Neilson rating, but not as inclusive since it misses what we watch live.

I hadn't thought of it before, but it makes sense.

So non-free is goods for you!

[twitter]

... it's good for TiVo to have another revenue stream and a way to keep networks and advertisers happy, since generally the content providers have been working pretty hard to fight against DVR.

Don't forget how vital this kind of feed back is for producing quality advertisements. If it were not for digital restrictions that force you to watch and evaluate ads, people on Madison Avenue would be so far out of touch that you might describe them as having their heads shove up their ass. The ads would surely suck much worse. See? Aren't you glad that you are not really in control of your recorder, that you are forced to watch advertisements? What a great deal for the $250/month you pay your cable company. A DVR that's not a DVR but more like a pay per play juke box from hell. I mean, when you can just watch what you pay for instead of whatever is being broadcast, 90% of your advertisement watching goes out the window. A free DVR that could skip advertisements all together would eliminate the last 10% and and and that would be terrible. Think of the quality messages you will be missing. Isn't that why you pay for cable TV? I know it's why I don't.

Re:in CCCP

[BSAlert]

I agree with you as well. There are plenty of important issues affecting peoples' privacy and this is not one of them.