I remember visiting a client’s house some time ago. As we worked in the downstairs office, the television sat in the background, blaring one of The Duke’s old movies. Nobody was watching it, so I asked why it was on. “Oh,” the woman said, “[her husband] loves John Wayne, and leaves it on so they know people watch it, and will keep showing it.”

This little encounter came to mind the other day when I was reading about IPTV, or television delivered using the Internet Protocol (like streaming, except it doesn’t suck.) Many people don’t know it, but the cable and telephone companies are expected to soon wage a massive war. As the CableCos have begun to offer phone service, the phone companies are investigating ways to deliver video over their own connection to the home. For a variety of technical reasons, IPTV is well suited to this.

While the tech is interesting, the implications for personal privacy are even more so. Consider for a moment how ratings are calculated presently: the A. C. Nielsen company picks families and (in most cases) asks them to keep a paper log of what the watch, or (in a few markets) installs “people meters” to do it automatically. Either way, these sample groups are then extrapolated to take a guess at what everyone is watching.

If that sounds sort of quaint, that’s because it is. In the traditional broadcast realm, my friend has no hope of getting his John Wayne preference recorded, unless he’s part of a Nielsen family. The IPTV approach, on the other hand, goes far beyond “viewing notebooks”: every time you select a channel, your cable box asks for that “stream” from the company server — at which point the service provider may record your request.

The privacy implications are stunning. From a technical standpoint, it would be trivial for your Internet/TV provider to read your e-mail, record your Internet searches, and even cross-reference it all with your TV viewing, then sell it all to, say, Acxiom (who are they?).

The ramifications are also strong on the production side. Imagine the implications for the news. Up-to-the-moment statistics, of the sort heretofore only enjoyed by QVC: “we killed with that Swift Boat thing, string it out!” or “people are tuning out when we cover Sudan, let’s shorten the international news block…”

Do I worry too much?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 13th, 2005 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Miscellany.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.