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Monday, February 5, 2007
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Google's Master Plan (Video). Here[base ']s a slick video by some German students about privacy concerns with Google[base ']s ability to collect personal information. Little heavy on conspiracy theories (Google DNA?), and totally lacking in any theoretical analysis (that[base ']s what my dissertation is for), but nice to see some effort going into communicating these concerns to a broader audience.
[via Google Blogoscoped]
[michaelzimmer.org]
1:44:45 PM 
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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."
1:37:53 PM
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© Copyright 2007 Paul Hardwick.
Last update: 3/4/07; 3:39:41 AM.
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