[Infowarrior] - TiVo sees if you skip those ads

[Richard Forno]

TiVo sees if you skip those ads

David Lazarus

Sunday, February 4, 2007

http://tinyurl.com/2e23xr

TiVo revealed the other day that it's offering TV networks and ad agencies a
chance to receive second-by- second data about which programs the company's
4.5 million subscribers are watching and, more importantly, which
commercials people are skipping.

This raises a pair of troubling questions: Is TiVo, which revolutionized TV
viewing with its digital video recording technology, now watching what
people watch? And is it selling that sensitive info to advertisers and
others?

The answers, apparently, are no and no.

"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.

"We don't know what any particular person is watching," he said. "We only
know what a random, anonymous sampling of our user base is watching."

Still, privacy advocates say TiVo's new data service -- dubbed StopWatch --
reflects the growing ease with which companies could, if they so choose,
collect and exploit vast amounts of information about consumers' everyday
habits.

"It's a constant struggle to maintain your privacy in the modern era," said
Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at San Francisco's Electronic Frontier
Foundation. "We have entered an era in which more and more information about
you is being collected and maintained."

He added: "In the past, you had a lot of privacy protection because
information about you was too difficult to collect and sort. Now that
protection is gone because computers can do it."

TiVo's potential to monitor (and embarrass) millions of people was made
clear in 2004 after Janet Jackson's right breast made a surprise appearance
during the Super Bowl halftime show.

TiVo reported that this fleeting glimpse of celebrity flesh "drew the
biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured ... as hundreds of
thousands of households used TiVo's unique capabilities to pause and replay
live television to view the incident again and again."

More than a few subscribers probably thought later that this wasn't the sort
of thing they wanted stored in some corporate database.

"That initial reaction of concern is understandable," said Ray
Everett-Church, a Silicon Valley privacy consultant and longtime TiVo user.
"It's hard to know for a fact that they don't keep that information."

But he said he's prepared to take TiVo at its word that sensitive data about
users' viewing habits aren't being stored or shared with others.

"If they're careful about how they anonymize and aggregate the information,
I don't see huge problems," Everett-Church said.

(TiVo said last week that once again it will be closely monitoring audience
behavior during today's Super Bowl to see how often users pause and rewind
"unscripted moments and entertainment.")

TiVo's Juenger said the Alviso company downloads usage data from a random
sampling of about 20,000 set-top boxes each night. That data, he said, is
stripped of any personally identifiable information before being mixed with
other users' data for research and marketing purposes.

"All we know is that we have an anonymous box out there with certain viewing
behaviors," he said.

Juenger recalled how the Justice Department issued subpoenas last year to
Google and other Internet companies for access to data on people's online
searches. (Google fought the subpoena and forced the Justice Department to
significantly scale back its data request.)

"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."

Not for much longer, though. Juenger said TiVo is gearing up for a
Nielsen-style rating service in which a select group of subscribers will
volunteer to have their viewing tracked. In this case, participants'
personal data will be part of the mix.

"It's absolutely something we're looking at," Juenger said. "Our clients
have told us it's something they want."

The hack is back: Speaking of TiVo, I'm always getting requests to repeat
the code discovered by hackers for programming TiVo remotes to skip ahead
through recorded commercials at 30-second intervals.

Here it is: Select Play Select 30 Select.

The trick is to do the hack while a recorded program is playing. Point your
remote at the TiVo box and press, in sequence, the Select button, the Play
button, the Select button again, the 3 button, the 0 button and then Select
one last time.

If you do it correctly, you'll hear three dings from your box. Now the
Advance button (the one with a Play arrow and a vertical line at the right
edge) can be used to jump ahead by 30 seconds, thus zipping past commercials
more easily than fast forwarding.

David Lazarus' column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He also can
be heard Saturdays, 4 to 7 p.m., on KGO Radio. Send tips or feedback to
dlazarus at sfchronicle.com.

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