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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."
in soviet russia, TiVo watches you!!
Why UNIX?
I always assumed they did this, am I the only one?
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal
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'm inclined to think that maybe this is a good thing. If no individual privacy is being trampled, then 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.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
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...
and that's a very scary thing, letting prospective employers know what I watch.
You mean, the Discovery network's new Tinfoil Hat Channel?
Which part of not-tied-to-personal-accounts are you not getting? Personally, I'm happy if the data they're aggregating delivers messages such as "80% of our viewers think your 'Head-On! Apply Directly To Your Forehead' pain reliever ads are the broadcast equivalent of gerbil vomit" to the people who buy, sell, and produce the ads.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
In the article, refers to what services its "clients" want--but Tivo isn't talking about all the people who forked over cash for Tivos and pay an over inflated monthly subscription. No, the people Tivo considers its clients are the media companies it sells viewership data to.
It would be nice if Tivo would think of its loyal customers as clients rather than a captive audience to sell data about and to force feed advertisements to. 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. 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.
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.
This isn't news. Sure feel free to get up in arms about marketing companies knowing what an anonymous hashed identity is watching.
Please note, that the supermarkets do exactly the same thing. Why do you think loyalty cards exist?
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I think an end result (and to some an unexpected result) is TiVo can make life better for everyone with this "service". I've always been a huge fan of TiVo, since they arrived on the scene, so forgive some obvious bias.
How can they make it better? Tivo can supply information to providers of content, and advertisers more valuable than any surveys or polls. Tivo can give real time info (rolled up) of what and how viewers watch their show (and ads). An end result would (potentially) be eventual extinction of really annoying and bad ads... by dint of the fact noone watches them when given an opportunity to skip.
The same goes for content... if noone records a show, or watches it on Tivo buffer, its well earned demise can be accelerated.
Tivo demonstrated just how granular their data are by their disclosure that the Janet Jackson "clip" was the most replayed segment of the Super Bowl... wth? they actually know down to a few seconds of snippets.
Yeah, there may be privacy issues there... but there are privacy issues everywhere, even when there were (are there still?) Nielsen families. My gut tells me there isn't too much interesting in viewers habits other than what they're watching and how much of they're watching. The game is about making money and selling product.
Tivo finally gives the providers feedback that I'd wished for years ago... immediate, and absolute.
This attack may come from someone who cracks the system and uses it to spy on others, or the attack may come from law-suits which (for whatever reason I can't currently imagine) demand that TiVo turn over records of what a particular person was watching. Or maybe this attack will never come.
I would argue that avoiding these kinds of systems is not paranoid... moreover I would argue that avoiding them is necessary. Do not let yet another system be co-opted to monitor you! Even if it is 'for a good cause' (and I'm not convinced that advertising is 'a good cause') it can eventually be used against you.
In short, I'm just going to add this to the list of reasons I prefer MythTV. My device, my control, my privacy.
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
"...selling data on what parts of broadcasts people are rewinding for review..."
This can only result in more nudity on TV. Woohoo!
OK, it'll be naked people holding pepsi bottles, but what the hell. Maybe they could do something with them, hint hint.
I quit!
Oh come on. Everyone with a TiVo (and even those without) should know that TiVo collects this type of anonymous, aggregate data. Haven't they done that since the beginning? Did you really think they wouldn't provide that data to third parties?
And frankly, I think it's a good thing. You guys bitch and moan when your favorite TV shows get cancelled because the Nielsen families' interests aren't representative of your own. You guys bitch and moan about advertisers not making more interesting commercials. Well, here you have TiVo, making geek-friendly devices collecting television data about shows and commercials that tech enthusiasts actually watch, and now you guys bitch and moan about that too.
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.
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.