Report On Interactive Television Technologies Documents New Threats To Privacy

5-Jul-01

A report released by the Center for Digital Democracy documents how the interactive television (ITV) industry is designing and deploying new technologies that will allow tremendous amounts of personal information about TV viewers to be captured and analyzed. The report, entitled ìTV That Watches You: The Prying Eyes of Interactive Television,î surveys the range of technologies and corporations involved in reshaping American television, transforming it into a vast data collection and interactive direct marketing machine. Through set-top boxes, personal video recorders, and other devices, consumers will soon face the same privacy threats that now confront users of the Internet.The report (using the cable and advertising industriesí own information and analyses, from product literature, SEC filings, conferences, Web sites, and trade publications) documents a growing trend that is transforming the infrastructure of the television industry. Along with programming, there will also be a massive collection of TV viewer information - including age, vocation, discretionary income, and parental status. Such information, along with psychographic and demographic data, will be collected and ìharvestedî into individual profiles. Every turn of the channel or click of the remote, every program viewed or commercial skipped over, will be fed back through the TV and made available to cable systems, other programmers, and advertisers. This emerging threat to privacy is possible because television is being upgraded with digital technologies, including the basic set-top boxes now found in millions of American homes, allowing it to become much more interactive. As most of TV becomes digital (as required by U.S. law), ITV will become a pervasive delivery platform, providing interactive programming services as well as Internet access, e-mail, Web browsing, chat, and instant messaging.Some of the nationís best known corporations and media leaders are developing invasive ITV applications, including cable TV giant AT&T, Liberty Media, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (through NDS), A.C. Nielsen, TV Guide (Gemstar), Proctor and Gamble, and Young and Rubicam. ìThrough the development of hardware and software, these and other companies are creating a new TV infrastructure in the U.S. that will engage in unprecedented data collection, along with new - and potentially deceptive - marketing practices,î observed Jeff Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy. ìThe American public is not being given an opportunity to decide whether such technology and interactive advertising campaigns should be permitted to enter their homes. In the face of industry opposition to any meaningful privacy safeguards, coupled with the obvious need for comprehensive protections, ITV poses a major threat.îChester also noted that the market imperatives driving the burgeoning ITV industry - locking subscribers into closed systems that push affiliated content as aggressively as they pull information from the set-top transactions of unsuspecting customers - will limit the potential of ITV to serve the public interest. ìWeíve already given broadcasters billions of dollars worth of spectrum for the transition to digital TV, without requiring any additional public service obligations in return,î Chester explained. ìAnd now, absent regulation and enlightened public policy, we are about to squander another opportunity to harness digital technology on behalf of the public interest.î TV could become an important citizenís medium, Chester added, one that provides, along with access to the Internet, additional new programming and informational options for Americans. But just as the cable industry is opposed to true open-access networks, it is equally opposed to an ITV medium that both protects privacy and respects consumer choice.Whether privacy and choice can be fostered in the digital era, the new CDD report points out, depends on the actions we take now. The full implications of the ITV revolution must be examined, in both the regulatory and public policy arenas. Accordingly, CDD makes the following recommendations:- Regulators must investigate violations of the Cable Communications Policy Act- Congress must update and extend the Cable Communications Policy Act- Industry must support meaningful privacy protection- States should enact their own safeguards- Manufacturers must build privacy protection into their productsDavid Burke, the British Director of White Dot, an international campaign against television (www.whitedot.org), advised CDD in the course of compiling its new report. His book Spy TV was written as a viewerís guide to ITV, exposing the ways in which industry plans to use viewer data. ìWhat really excites these people,î says Burke, ìis the way interactive television creates experimental conditions in the home. Your TV set will be able to show you something, monitor how you respond, and then show you something else - working on you over time until it sees the behavior it wants.î Burke recently used his experience as a software developer to join the Addressable Media Coalition, the industryís trade body, which plans to create its own ìprivacy compliance sealî this fall. The inadequacy of such self-regulation, Burke suggests, is exposed by the statements of one of its leading members, to the effect that ìÖthere is no such thing as privacy. Itís all perception, itís all public relations.îAnother participant in the project, David Banisar, Deputy Director of Privacy International, is equally pessimistic about the status of consumer privacy in the face of ITV implementations that operate beyond the reach of existing regulations. ìThe massive data collection practices of these systems show the need for better legal protections for consumers,î he declared. ìMany of these companies are flaunting the 1984 Cable Policy Protection Act by collecting and using private viewing information without permission. Consumers who are not using cable systems have almost no protections. The act needs to cover all interactive television technologies and have better enforcement mechanisms.îThe report is available at CDDís Web site (now under construction) at www.democraticmedia.org/privacyreport.pdf. CDD is a nonprofit organization working to ensure that new broadband technologies serve the public interest. The report was researched and written by the staff of CDD. David Banisar of Privacy International, was a principal investigator for the project. The report is being released in association with David Burke of White Dot, who served as a consultant.