They can in the aggregate; they cannot track this information for any user who hasn’t opted in. I don’t know if they share that info with any advertisers. I imagine they probably do.
–Cliffy
Last year we finished a 2 year stint as a Nielsen Family with a People Meter box in our homes (no diary) and I asked about Tivo (which we had)…
The answer is that Tivo shows are counted when they are watched. If you record something but don’t watch it, it doesn’t count.
The people meter is fairly sophisticated, and can tell what source a show is coming from (e.g. Live TV vs. Tivo), knows who is watching the show (you have to electronically register when you enter and leave the room) and even knows if the sound is turned up on the show.
As was mentioned up-thread, we couldn’t mention we were a Nielsen family lest someone try to influence us, but on the other hand, if we had visitors watch TV with us, we had to register their age and gender with the People Meter. I think since we’re out of the program, I’m not violating any rules by saying that we were once in.
Be careful with the “cannot” there. They clearly can track everything you do on your Tivo quite easily. They even bragged about counting how many people went back and re-watched Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction”. So they really are watching what you are doing. Since the inbound information would include all the info needed to identify your box (and therefore your household), they would actually have to throw away the identifying information.
In short, is Tivo trustworthy or not? There are many cases of companies saying one thing and doing another in regards to privacy rules.
They do, in fact, throw away the identifying information so that they have no way of associating specific viewing actions with specific users. They can use their data to say that x% of SuperBowl viewers re-watched the wardrobe malfunction, but they can’t say whether I re-watched it or not.
TiVo is quite public about their ability to measure user activity, but at the same time they take customer privacy very seriously. Think about it: if they violated that privacy, and it got out, they’d lose customers in droves. Sometimes a company is trustworthy because it’s in their own best self-interest to be so.