Friday, Sep 5, 2008
In 1984, arguing for deregulation of media industries, Mark Fowler, President Reagan's FCC chairman, famously called TV "just another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures." As critics pointed out, Fowler's comment missed the mark: The societal impact of TV, its power to shape our lives as it does, goes way beyond that of sliced bread. If TV is just a toaster with pictures, then paintings are just cloth with drawings, and books just paper and ink. But Fowler was right in one sense; until recently, our TVs haven't been terribly sophisticated devices. At the time he spoke, a TV was, technologically at least, not much more intelligent than a kitchen appliance, and it always had been that way. In the '80s a TV worked pretty much the same way that one did in the '50s -- you just plugged it in and turned it on. Along the way there had been some improvements -- a color picture, the remote control, the VCR -- but none of those things altered the essential transaction a viewer makes with his television: You watch the TV. It doesn't watch you.
But the digital technologies of the 1990s changed that relationship. Digital set-top boxes, satellite receivers and digital video recorders such as TiVo allowed television sets to act as mini-computers. TVs can now process data, store it, and transmit it to other machines. The new devices have obvious advantages; they allow for hundreds of channels, produce on-screen guides to make those channels more navigable, and, in the case of the digital recorders, give viewers unprecedented power over TV networks' programming schedules. But they have other capabilities, too. TVs equipped with the new technologies can, for the first time, monitor the people watching the screen.
Indeed, one of TiVo's main features is its ability to predict what you may like to see based on other shows you've enjoyed, and many set-top boxes employ similar profiling technology. And, so far, the products on the market seem to work in accordance with privacy polices that could probably satisfy the vast majority of us. TiVo's policy, for instance, allows your box to send viewing data to the firm in a manner that keeps the information anonymous. This lets the company compile information about how all its users watch TV, but it can't determine anything about a single user.
But it's difficult to remain sanguine about current privacy policies when you think about how people use television. Watching TV is a particularly passive experience, completely unlike reading a book or surfing the Web. When you watch television you are, physiologically, extremely relaxed and suggestible. Think about the way you use your remote control. Most likely you have the shape of the buttons memorized; you handle the thing in a kind of hypnotic state, changing channels without even really thinking about what you're doing. Imagine what that "clickstream" -- the chronological record of every button you press -- says about you: The speed with which you change channels, the frequency with which you press the mute button, how loud you like your TV, what sort of music videos catch your eye, what sort of ads catch your eye -- all that information can tell quite a story. And getting to that story, that intimate picture of your interaction with your television, would be an advertiser's Holy Grail.
Several companies, including Predictive, the firm that analyzes remote control clicks, are working on ways to mine all the data from your viewing habits in order to produce a detailed picture about you. And the pictures are quite accurate. For instance, on average, people spend about 270 seconds on the channels Predictive's software determines they may like. That's significantly better than the channels those people key in themselves -- 150 seconds -- or that they get to by browsing with the channel-up and channel-down buttons (eight seconds per channel).
Representatives of all of the companies interviewed for this article stressed that their technologies protect the privacy of their users, and, in many instances, their words are backed up by stringent privacy policies. But David Burke, a writer, computer programmer and the head of White Dot, a British group that wants us all to watch less television, is still concerned. Burke, who began thinking about and investigating the nefarious possibilities of iTV several years ago (he wrote a book on the subject called "Spy TV,") has published some rather damning inside-baseball conversations with executives pushing interactive television, folks whose concern for users' privacy is clearly overshadowed by their exuberance for targeted advertising dollars.
In the summer of 2001, he "infiltrated" a meeting of the Addressable Media Coalition, a trade group representing companies interested in "addressing" specific commercials to specific households. There's a lot of money to be made here; companies will pay much more to sell ads to those people already inclined to buy its products. (It does you no good to show a Mercedes ad to a struggling musician, the thinking goes.) But Burke discovered that the companies proposing an addressable TV-ad market are rather secretive about the whole business. "You don't want to talk to the press about any of this," one executive said at the meeting. "If some bad P.R. got out, whether it's true or not, it might take us a year to make it up."
"Everyone nodded," Burke writes. "They all agreed they couldn't afford to make the same mistakes they had on the Internet -- rushing into a medium they didn't control, without a strategy in place, a back-up plan, just in case users found out about all those cookies." He adds that "companies who make interactive television are keen to talk about 'the coming digital revolution,' hoping viewers will forget about the one that has already happened. Interactive TV is really a digital counter-revolution, walling in the content that viewers can see, and handing control of their news and leisure time back to broadcasters."
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