Monday, May 12, 2008
Advertisers want to use new technology to monitor your every click -- and prevent you from tuning out their ads. And don't even think of trying to escape.
May 8, 2003 | Several years ago, Predictive Networks, a software company based in Cambridge, Mass., set out to determine what it could tell about a person based on how he or she used a television remote control.
Predictive discovered that by recording every button-press on a remote and analyzing the resulting data, the company could pick out distinct "channel surfing patterns." After learning these patterns, Predictive's software could determine which one of several members of a household has control of the TV at any particular time. Predictive found that men and women use the TV remote control quite differently; during commercial breaks, men engage in a kind of rapid-fire channel surfing, while women tend to switch to only one or two other channels, if they surf at all.
When the company combines this remote-usage data with information on the shows and ads that the person using the remote has watched, its software can guess whether a viewer is male or female. And, because your channel-surfing behavior is significantly affected by others in the room, Predictive can also tell whether there is more than one person watching the television.
The company's software -- which it now sells for use in cable and satellite set-top boxes -- builds digital profiles of each person regularly using a particular TV, a statistical analysis of your TV tendencies that functions as a sketchy picture of your personality. Peter Mondics, Predictive's CEO, says that his software can get to know you quite well. It can, for instance, suggest with surprising accuracy what you may want to watch on TV.
Predictive says that it has gone to great lengths to protect the data its software collects about people; the company uses no personally identifiable information, so your name is never tied to your profile. But the company's software is indicative of a trend in the TV world, one toward ever-more "targeted" advertising that relies on gaining more and more knowledge about TV viewers. The TVs and TV accessories currently being sold to Americans -- digital video recorders, set-top boxes, etc. -- can now be equipped with software to monitor how we watch those pictures and to report back to advertisers. Soon, companies will be marketing cars, soap, insurance and beer by addressing each American's innermost wants and needs -- do you like great taste, or less filling? -- right in our living rooms, on our trusty old TVs.
In an era of deregulation, much of this monitoring is currently not illegal, and there are signs that cable systems like it that way. After Sept. 11, 2001, when Attorney General John Ashcroft asked Congress for more power to monitor cable lines to fight terrorism, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a cable industry trade group, did not strenuously object. Many critics accused the group of wanting privacy rules relaxed for its own members' marketing purposes, although the NCTA denied that charge. At the same time, at the behest of movie studios, legislators in several states are now contemplating laws that would prevent TV viewers from connecting many devices to their cable and satellite systems that could protect them against being profiled by their TVs. Which means that soon -- and imperceptibly -- our rights as couch potatoes may be radically circumscribed: They'll have the right to watch us, to study us, and to sell to us, and we won't be able to do anything about it.
Other than turning off the TV.
Get Salon in your mailbox!