I think that I have a pretty good understanding of how my Tivo works. Everything comes in as digital stream. You can record it, and you can let the buffer hold the last 30 minutes of what you’ve watched. But do they know when you rewind and what you’re watching (and when) from your bank of stored programming?
I heard on the radio this morning a sound bite that said that the boob during the halftime show and “the 30 seconds following saw the biggest spike ever in Tivo activity, with people replaying and rewinding.” Of course they can tell what you’re recording, but how do they now what you’re replaying and watching? Is the phone cord telling them more than I think it is? Or was it just to say that more people started recording then that at any other time and the radio quote was poorly worded?
Tivo said they derived their figures from 20,000 “anonymous” subscribers. From what I could gather from their announcement, they have the ability to tap into at least some number of subscribers at any minute during the day to see what they’re doing.
Although I don’t subscribe to Tivo, don’t they sometimes send you an email suggesting you’d want to record this or that program? How do you think they’d know what supposedly interests you if they didn’t have a record of what you were watching?
So, yes, the phone cord is telling them more than you think it is.
It’s not an email. You get a list of “Tivo recommends” that , AFAIK, is driven from the pro-active ratings that you give shows/movies. You can give anything you are watching a rating from three thumbs down to three thumbs up. From what I can tell, this is what they base you recommends list from.
When your TiVo downloads the new schedule every few days, a small random sample of TiVo boxes are asked to upload stats about their masters. What shows they’ve been recording, how many hours they watch per week, etc. The TiVo people claim that the information is kept anonymous.
A few years ago a privacy watchdog group did a study of TiVo. (Don’t remember who and I wasn’t able to quickly find a cite.) Basically, IIRC, your TiVo knows everything and transmits it TiVo headquarters. However, when it gets there most of your identifying information is stripped away. Therefore, TiVo HQ knows that billions of people rewatched the boob shot, but it can’t tell specifically that any given TiVo customer did so, or even whether any given customer was watching the Super Bowl. I believe it is possible for TiVo to reconstruct this data, but I’m not really sure about that, and I am pretty sure that they don’t actually do this in the ordinary course of business.
“As a rebuttal of the testimony offered by Mr. Johnson’s character witnesses, I submit to the court his TiVo records. These records indicate he was not watching the education programs as he asserted but instead a steady stream of so-called reality-tv programming and Shannon Tweed videos. Next I will introduce Mr. Johnson’s On-Star vehicle records…”
Speaking as a TiVo owner I believe that the devices actually record every single button push on your remote in a log file on its harddrive and this file is one of the things that gets uploaded.
Because of the privacy group’s actions mentioned above it is now possible to tell TiVo that you wish to “opt out” of any data collection on your device. You must** request** this or they collect it by default. It must be in their service agreement (which nobody ever reads). Even if you don’t I think it has been independently verified that your personal info is kept completely separate from the aggregate data.
Having the info ‘in aggregate’ would be ok by me for most cases, but what if every single TiVo user was watching the Superbowl and rewound and paused the JJ boob shot and TiVo then said, “all our TiVo subscribers froze frame the Jackson boob”. . . . what would my mom, who knows I have a TiVo set, think?