"Would you let your TV watch you?" by Hiawatha Bray | Globe Staff, June 14, 2013
US Representative Michael E. Capuano filed legislation Thursday that would allow consumers to block efforts by Verizon Communications Inc. and other video distributors to use new technologies to track the behavior of customers as they watch television.
Cable and technology companies such as Verizon are trying to develop monitoring systems that would be built into cable TV subscribers’ set-top boxes or digital video recorders and use cameras and microphones to keep tabs on the movements and comments of viewers — even to the point of detecting their moods.
The companies would then select advertisements that would be most likely to appeal to those viewers.
Such living room surveillance systems are not yet in use, but Capuano said Congress should make sure consumer protections are in place before companies begin collecting such data.
Do you think we believe they are not in use yet? After the NSA scandal?
So much for the "privacy" of your own home!
“I think it’s important to begin this conversation before we get too far down the road,” said Capuano, a Somerville Democrat.
His bill, also sponsored by Representative Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, is called the We Are Watching You Act.
Capuano said television systems that record and analyze viewer behavior could pose a significant threat to privacy. His measure would allow consumers to opt out of monitoring altogether at any time. If a viewer opts in and allows monitoring, the company would have to clearly display “We are watching you” on the TV screen.
Why do we have to OPT OUT?
Companies would also have to tell consumers what information is being collected and how it would be used.
Yes, it is being sent along to the NSA.
The proposal comes amid widespread outrage over reports that the National Security Agency routinely intercepts the telephone records of millions of Americans and taps into databases belonging to the largest Internet companies.
Technology analyst Roger Kay said that public anger at the NSA and Capuano’s proposal both reflect a growing fear that digital technologies have put the right to privacy under siege.
“Here we are again in this sort of Orwellian moment,” said Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc. in Wayland. “The human institutions haven’t had time to catch up with the technology.”
Literally if you read 1984.
Capuano’s bill was inspired by reports that Verizon in 2011 unsuccessfully sought a patent for a monitoring system that would determine what kind of ads to broadcast to viewers based on their behavior while watching TV.
The system would detect sound, body movements, and activities such as eating and drinking and present commercials to those viewers accordingly. A viewer drinking a can of Budweiser, for example, may see an ad for the beer company, Verizon said in patent documents. The system would even detect moods, determining that someone humming or singing an upbeat tune was happy....
Can they detect irritation and anger?
Or the system could detect two people “cuddling on a couch” and deliver “a commercial for a romantic getaway vacation, a commercial for a contraceptive, a commercial for flowers, a commercial including a trailer for an upcoming romantic comedy movie, etc.”
So what sick corporate monitor is going to get his jollies off monitoring you?
Verizon on Thursday declined to comment. In a statement provided last year to the online publication Business Insider, Verizon said it “has a well-established track record of respecting its customers’ privacy and protecting their personal information” and added that “such futuristic patent filings by innovators are routine.”
In light of the NSA scandal, that looks and smells like a pile of horse manure.
The Verizon patent request was recently rejected by the Patent and Trade Office.
Capuano said his first reaction to the Verizon plan was disbelief. “This has to be a joke or some kind of science fiction thing,” he said. But he has since learned that not only Verizon but other companies are working on a similar system.
Nope. It's all too real.
Microsoft Corp., which builds video cameras and microphones into its Kinect video gaming devices, filed a patent application in 2011 for a system that would track TV viewer activity. Microsoft’s system would reward users who stayed put during commercials, instead of going to the bathroom, for example.
On Thursday, Microsoft referred to a posting on a corporate blog in which it states the Kinect system does not spy on users, and moreover gives them total control over sharing data.
No one believes them anymore.
Brian Blau, a research director in consumer technologies at Gartner Inc., said Capuano’s bill might make sense if applied to large living room TV sets.
But nowadays, many people watch TV on laptops, tablets, and smartphones. They, too, have cameras and microphones that could be used to record viewer behavior, but their small screens could be obstructed by a constant warning.
Blau said the bill “doesn’t take into account all the different ways we can be recognized and all the different ways we can be advertised to.”
Do you recognize this?
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NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Future of 3D-TV murky as ESPN ends a channel; Households’ usage still limited" by Brian Stelter | New York Times, June 17, 2013
NEW YORK —A few years ago, 3-D was hailed as the next big thing in television, the logical successor to high definition. But viewers in the United States did not buy the hype, and now the eye-popping format is seen as an expensive flop.
We couldn't afford it due to the crap economy that is doing just fine (mostly) in my Globe bu$ine$$ section.
That impression was cemented last week when ESPN, the nation’s largest sports network and an early adopter of 3-D technology, said it was turning off its three-year-old 3-D channel. A spokeswoman said the decision was “due to limited consumer adoption of 3-D services to the home.”
Well, I can cross that item off the notepad.
The news spurred debate about whether anyone would be left watching in 3-D soon, or whether anything would be available worth watching.
“Many in the industry have said over the last few years that if ESPN ever pulled the plug on 3-D TV, that would be the format’s final chapter,” Phillip Swann, publisher of the industry website TVPredictions.com, wrote after ESPN’s announcement. “Today, it’s hard to deny that statement.”
The only other big 3-D channel, called 3net (a joint venture of Discovery Communications, Sony, and Imax), said it was undeterred. But 3net has had a hard time getting onto cable and satellite systems, and a Discovery spokesman said last week that “it’s our equivalent of R&D,” or research and development, hardly a rousing endorsement.
The format is healthier at the box office, but even there, only 36 films were released in 3-D last year, down 20 percent from the peak in 2011, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Overall, 3-D box office revenue was flat.
When television manufacturers started to aggressively market the technology in 2010 — helped by the theatrical release of “Avatar” by James Cameron in December 2009 and fantastical ideas about how it would feel to be immersed in a sporting event or an action movie — skeptics predicted little consumer demand for 3-D television. They turned out to be right. Television owners generally rejected the glasses that were usually required to see in 3-D and found the format was not as immersive as promised.
Okay, the promised experience became a letdown, a common occurrence with the ma$$ media; I don't find the gla$$es being a legitimate rea$on, but okay; and blame Cameron and his anti-empire movie! I love it!
And after learning above that the technology can watch you (so they didn't get a patent, so what?), I think I'll just stick with my antiquated piece of crap. Sorry economy.
But pioneering networks like ESPN, controlled by Walt Disney Co., learned much about what did and did not work. In stadiums, for instance, 3-D cameras had to be closer to the field than traditional cameras.
ESPN televised 380 sporting events in 3-D, but the dedicated channel never became big enough to be rated by Nielsen Co. That may be because it was sold separately from other channels; the research firm SNL Kagan recently estimated it had “well under 1 million” paying subscribers.
Amy Phillips, an ESPN spokeswoman, said, “While we don’t necessarily have a gauge of the most popular, we do know from viewer feedback that big events like the BCS National Championship Game and the tennis majors were fan favorites.”
Some Summer Olympics events were televised in 3-D last year, too. NBCUniversal has not said whether it will do that again during the Winter Olympics next February in Sochi, Russia.
Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president for Gartner, a technology research company, said the 3-D format suffered from “a chicken-and-egg situation where content wasn’t created because of low penetration of 3-D TVs in the home, and consumers were not buying 3-D TVs due to the lack of compelling content.”
While many big-screen television sets now come with 3-D capabilities and glasses, most households with those sets rarely use them, if at all. “Our family falls in that category,” Milanesi said.
Data from DisplaySearch, a unit of NPD Group, suggests that sales of 3-D sets are stronger overseas. For the 3net joint venture, that has been important.
“The content library is helping us across a number of business segments,” said David C. Leavy, a spokesman for Discovery. “Some Europe and Asia markets where there is more interest and competition among operators are doing deals with 3-D content.”
Meanwhile, the television manufacturers that had been pushing 3-D are now promoting a newer format, “ultra HD” or 4K, which promises four times the resolution of the high-definition sets that most Americans own.
I remember when I was going to do a new format.
Never mind that in many cases the additional detail is not perceptible by the human eye....
Yeah, we got an event better ver$ion for you, even if you don't notice. Now come along and upgrade!
I think I've stopped perceiving this story (click).
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Related: ‘Man of Steel’ takes flight with strong $125m debut
No offense, but not really intere$ted. I'll wait for it to come on TV.
Also see: Sunday Globe Special: CBS Cancels Boston Fireworks
If they would phony up the Fourth of July fireworks, what wouldn't they fake?
Indeed, the technology is outpacing the human brain.
