Tivo is Watching You
Yes, it’s true. Tivo knows when you skip ads.
Tivo knows when you’ve been bad or good. So be good for goodness sake.
A story on SFGate talks about Tivo’s new DVR ratings service called StopWatch that was announced last week. In it, a Tivo representative says this:
“I promise with my hand on a Bible that your data is not being archived and sold,” said Todd Juenger, TiVo’s vice president and general manager of audience research and measurement.”
Um, well at least not individually. Tivo is definitely capturing information from a sample of 20,000 users for its ratings service, however. And I think that’s OK.
But really, your medical records are probably being used in research without your knowledge. Again, it’s used in aggregate form. But medical researchers often use medical records to retroactively look at how care was performed, for example. Aggregate data is OK for most things, so why not for Tivo?
A few years ago, Tivo announced that the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction was the most watched moment, with the most rewinds, during the Superbowl. So Tivo definitely knows what’s going on.
But privacy advocates worry if Tivo can sell individual data. Or release it to the government if they ask for it. After all, Google was cooperating with the U.S. government last year to hand over its search data.
Juenger says in the article:
“If we were subpoenaed by the Justice Department, we would be literally incapable of saying what an individual user was watching,” Juenger said. “It would be impossible.”
But Tivo says that advertisers want more detailed data and they are looking into using a sample of subscribers where personal data will be part of the data.
Hmm. Tivo is swearing it is keeping individual privacy a secret. Should we keep them at their word?
DVR, PVR, Tivo, advertising, Super Bowl, Nielsen, TV ratings, StopWatch, digital video recorder
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