Our Verizon FiOS service was beginning to flake out, though could usually be restored by power-cycling the router. I decided that it was time to upgrade to Gbit service so I called up the friendly sales folks to sign up for a new package.
“Let me see what channels you watch,” said the agent. “Oh! Your favorite is NBC?” He sounded surprised. Other than watching the last five minutes of the Super Bowl (one hour of clock time?), we hadn’t turned on the TV since an attempt to tape “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
In other words, the agent knew what we watched and how much we watched, presumably from cable box data.
Is it common knowledge that TV viewing habits are not private in a cableized world? Why aren’t folks who say that Donald Trump is establishing a dictatorship concerned? Wouldn’t it be straightforward to use cable company data to find those who #Resist (e.g., by refusing to watch Fox News) and send them to concentration camps?
Your phone and TV are tracking you, and political campaigns are listening in https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-campaign-tech-privacy-20190220-story.html
> TV viewing habits are not private
It’s much the same for web sites, is it not? For example, this blog uses a script from stats.wp.com, probably in addition to logs recording ip addresses. For all we know, these are continuously correlated with the equivalent records from other sites your readers visit.
If it’s bad for cable employees to know what you watch, why is it OK for WordPress (at least!) to know what your blog readers read?
Yes, in many ways:
1) your cable company set-top box tracks what you do and reports it back. Why do you think cable companies have been resisting efforts to bypass the STB (e.g. CableCard) tooth and nail (well, that and the huge revenue from STB rental fees, of course).
2) Many “Smart” TVs will report what you watch back to the manufacturer using the TV’s Internet connection, and they sell that info to advertisers (Samsung and LG certainly do).
3) inaudible embedded audio fingerprints inside TV ads. Some mobile apps feed the microphone on your phone to software that looks for the fingerprints and reports it back to the ad networks.
Just another reason why it makes sense to get free ATSC OTA broadcasts instead of paying for cable TV, whether by connecting an aerial to the TV directly, or using something like a SiliconDust HDHomeRun network tuner box.
As for your political leanings, they are very easy to discern otherwise, from your choice of music to your food choices (e.g. kale == Democrat).
Old news. Anyone who wants to understand what’s being watched would begin with Nielsen and then work from there. They have the data, albeit their website isn’t clear about exactly which data they have. And Netflix (which is has now rendered Hollywood “irrelevant” according to Barry Diller) will know everything about everything anyone watches, anywhere.
Google forgot to document that their Nest security system includes a microphone. They forgot! What a bunch of amateurs! My god how did they ever get to where they are, forgetting things like that?
Update: My first and most innocent and/or naive take was that they want and need to know what you watch in such a granular way because they want to sell you various package deals, you know, for customer service, making sales pitches like normal people do. Then I guessed it was for troubleshooting purposes. Then I wondered about how they might need it to investigate theft of services. I was just skylarking. Of course nothing in our world is innocent or naive any more, and as Fazal alludes to, there’s a lot more. It has indeed been a big fight for several years now. I’ve apparently been living in a cave. I had no idea how big and loud this had become:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Set+top+box+data+boingboing&atb=v155-4bp&ia=web
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160609/12091134667/consumer-groups-say-att-comcast-violate-privacy-law-hoovering-up-cable-box-data-without-full-user-consent.shtml
That last one is June of 2016. I’ve decided to stop reading about it, someone else is going to have to lose sleep rather than me going through another Seven Stages. I’m not uninterested but the time is short. If anyone has a link to something brief, incisive and important about the current state of the war in Oceania, please do post it. Is all this stuff still being litigated? Is that a stupid question?
Aside: Speaking of keeping track of things, I’ve viewed the source of your pages on a couple of occasions to “look under the hood” (e.g., recently when I asked about the clickability of images) and I was initially puzzled that WordPress generates the following tag in the of each page:
It had been so long since I’d seen gmpg.org, all I had was a dim and distant memory, so I surfed over and immediately wondered, “What does Philip Greenspun have to do with the Global Multimedia Protocols Group, an experiment in metamemetics?” I was thinking maybe something to do with your work at MIT, so I read a little more and voila! Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash. Tantek Çelik, Eric Meyer…and of course…Matthew Mullenweg of WordPress!
The persistence of that tag is also discussed in many WordPress help fora, on reddit, etc., by people wondering why it’s there and how to remove it.
http://ma.tt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mullenweg
Compared to reading about cable companies collecting, using and selling all the data that belong to us, that last stuff was actually fun!