Washington — While you are watching television, your fancy new personal video recorder is telling others about your viewing habits.
In a report released Monday, The Privacy Foundation says the most popular personal TV recorder, TiVo, can send back very detailed information about what programs its users watch, what they record and even which buttons they press on the remote.
The company acknowledged it has been collecting the data from its subscribers, which now number 154,000. It plans to keep collecting information about what viewers watch and record so the data can be sold to advertisers and TV networks.
But it says it no longer will collect nuts-and-bolts data such as remote usage from every user. And it says it will not link the viewer data to their name, just gather it into one big database that can only identify users by ZIP code.
The Privacy Foundation, however, questions why the company needed to collect so much specific information in the first place and raises concerns whether subscriber were adequately informed.
"It looked like rocket telemetry information," Privacy Foundation technology officer Richard Smith said of TiVo's diagnostic logs. "I thought for a consumer electronic device, that whole diagnostic system is really a bit much."
The recorders work like a VCR with a hard-drive and interactive schedule that allows people to pause live television, skip commercials with a button or automatically select from a schedule which of their favorite programs to record.
TiVo is the industry leader, and a partner with AOL Time Warner. Microsoft's UltimateTV product will be on shelves soon as a rival.
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