Tivo Privacy Policies for Valentine’s Day Guru Guides
Last week, I signed up for Tivo Guru Guides, which gives you recommendations from “gurus” like TV Guide, Vogue and Sports Illustrated. They also offer package recommendations like the one currently being promoted about, the Valentine’s Day Guru Guide.
Tivo says this Guru Guide records some of the “world’s most romantic movies”. It’s all very heavy marketing, but I’m a sucker for marketing pitches.
So I signed up for it.
I’ve never tried Guru Guides before, so I’m excited at the content. But what I didn’t like was that I had to give up my privacy. When signing up for the Valentine’s Guru Guide, Tivo presented me with some privacy policy agreement (which I didn’t read). Nevertheless, I agreed to all of it in order to be part of their Guru Guide.
This privacy thing was interesting so I found an entire page that Tivo has dedicated to their privacy policies. Here’s a list of all of them:
Policies
Website Privacy Policy
Website Terms and Conditions (PDF)
TiVo Privacy Policy (Updated May 2006)
White Paper Submitted to the Federal Trade Commission, May 3, 2001 (PDF format)
TiVo Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy
TiVo Inc. Trademark Requirements
Service Agreements:
TiVo Service Payment Plan Terms and Conditions
TiVo Service Agreement For all Series1, Series2 and Series3 digital recorders.
TiVo Multi-Service Discount Agreement For multiple service subscriptions.
TiVo Basic and TiVo Plus Service Agreement For Pioneer and Toshiba DVD products with TiVo service
Terms and Conditions of the TiVo RewardsTM program (As Updated October 12, 2004)
Terms and conditions for TiVo Service Gift Cards
Er, Tivo must have lots of lawyers. Why so many privacy policies and terms and conditions? Having it all in one page really brings out the sheer quantity.
Anyway, I’ll report back tomorrow on the Valentine’s Day Guru Guide suggestions and tell you how it works.
Tivo, DVR, PVR, privacy, digital video recorder, personal video recorder
February 14th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
This is related to how Guru Guides work. In the past no personally identifiable information was uploaded to any TiVo servers. The default privacy option only allows for anonymized information to be uploaded. There is also the completely opt-out setting which stops all data uploads.
However, these preclude any sever-based features that interact with Season Passes, To Do list, etc, because you need data specific to the box. Guru Guides, and KidZone, use server-side logic to manage the recordings. To do this the server needs specific information from your unit(s). So they created the new privacy option level to allow for this, and users must explicitly agree because it is a change to the default privacy setting.