> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bryon Daly > Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 02:19 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: TiVo & privacy > > > I guess the real crux of the issue for me is that I don't > think they have > any business gathering that information in the first place; it is not > necessary for them to do so, and they don't get it as a > natural result of > the service they provide (as opposed to, say, supermarkets > tracking your > spending habits using your grocery discount card).
You better believe its important - easy skipping of commercials needs to be tracked so that they can defend the feature (or market it better) plus selling this kind of aggregate data to 3rd parties has got to bring them a pile of $.. which means my service i cheaper and eventually smarter. > TiVo users let their TiVo's dial-in so that they can download > the current > program listings. They *pay* a monthly/yearly fee for this > service. Making > the TiVo upload user behavior data is pure snoopery, whether > or not they only aggregatize it. How is it snoopery? Is it any wose than someone sitting in the mall watching what people wear to track fashion trends? > Maybe it's paranoid, but I just don't like the trend of > appliances that want > to connect up and share info about your behavior. *shrug* I don't honestly care, myself, as long as A) is aggregated, and B) it provides a direct benefit to the company (and thereby an inderect benefit to me) > Plus, there's my horror scenario: > TV broadcast and cable networks use this behavior data to > prove that - > *gasp* - viewers are skipping over commercials! Why, that's > *THEFT*. > (Don't laugh - I've already seen this argument presented > seriously). I am laughing, because I've never heard it presented by anyone credible :) Lobby > pressure builds on Congress to act on the "billions of lost > dollars" this > theft causes, and we get a new law requiring all new > video-recording/playback devices to have chips in them that > prevent skipping > over commercials. With of course any circumvention methods > being made > illegal by the DMCA. Since you don't use TiVo, why would that matter to you? Besides, if that happened, I've just build my own PVR (heck, TiVo is running a Linux distro, so its all open source at the root anyways..) -j- _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
