TiVo knows if you've been sleeping

News? or not really. If there is data, somebody is going to collect it, slice it into sashimi, and repackage it to some other corporation.

TiVo sees if you skip those ads

TiVo sees if you skip those ads

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.”

..
“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.”

and in case you've forgotten this hack (which I've published a couple of times previously, but my mom never seems to have hers set), here it is again:

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.

Tags: privacy, /surveillance, /TiVo