Info/Law

The New York Times reported yesterday [reg./$$$ required] that TiVo hopes to gather data about which television commercials get zapped (that is, skipped) and, eventually, who does the zapping. There are some skeptics quoted in the article who think TiVo’s relatively small market share (4.4 million users) and the limited sample size for each night’s analysis (20,000 users) makes the effort too small to be valuable. But for Pete’s sake, this is an industry that currently relies on intuition and focus groups. It seems obvious to me that most marketers will covet such data, particularly if general information about what commercials succeed could be coupled with demographic data about who skips what.

The Times doesn’t say this, but such analysis is remarkably similar to the kind routinely conducted by commercial web sites. It is easy for sites that require registration to pair that data with clickthrough rates and come up with the same stuff TiVo wants to produce for TV.

That leads to potential privacy problems, though it’s not so objectionable if such information is collected only in the aggregate. Hence this telling aside in the Times article:

For now, TiVo will not be able to tell advertisers anything about the demographics of the audience it measures. The privacy policy of the service allows it to gather data about viewing habits, but not any personal information. [Todd Juenger, TiVo’s vice president for audience research] said TiVo hoped to find a way to change that by the end of the year.

TiVo had better tread carefully here. It is four years since the Wall Street Journal ran its famous “My TiVo Thinks I’m Gay” story [alas, not available online] about the sometimes creepy analysis that a TiVo machine conducts on viewing habits. Their relatively strict privacy policy is partly a response to that zeitgeist-forming article, but the privacy-invading reputation continues to stick. If they change the policy to collect personal data and then spy on what you watch, I think we can forecast a giant blogstorm.

Filed under: Intermediaries, Media, Privacy