At 11:17 AM 3/10/01 -0600, you wrote:
>On Sat, 10 Mar 2001, J. van Baardwijk wrote:
>
> > At 11:50 10-3-01 -0600, Julia Thompson wrote:
> >
> > >No, what we *really* need is Tivo. But we don't have a phone line
> > >convenient for Tivo in the room where we'd want it set up. Maybe in a
> > >different house in the future....
> >
> > Tivo? What's Tivo? Sounds like a brand of dog food to me, but I can't see
> > what dog food has to do with a phone line... :)
>
>Oh, it's this box that records the signal your TV gets from whatever
>source (in my case, it would be cable) onto a hard drive and lets you
>watch stuff later, or pause *during* a broadcast and then let you pick up
>where you left off; if we had it, we could start our Tuesday night TV
>viewing a half-hour later, pause when we needed to, fast-forward up to
>"now" when we wanted to, and end up not more than a few minutes after the
>last show we wanted to watch was over.
>
>But it needs a phone line to get data regarding the times of the shows
>you've programmed into it, and the nearest phone to where we'd want to be
>using it is on the other side of a wall and across the kitchen, so it
>would get really awkward. (And there's a second story above all this, so
>we can't just easily run wires through the walls and up over the
>ceilings.)
>
>It's really cool, though -- all my friends who have it just love it.
>
> Julia
But do they know the following?
At 09:08 AM 3/27/01 -0700, The Standard's Media Grok wrote:
>=====================================================================
> THE STANDARD'S
> M E D I A G R O K
> A Commentary on What the Press Is Reporting and Why
>=====================================================================
> | http://www.thestandard.com |
>
>Tuesday, March 27, 2001
>
>
>
>TiVo Is Watching You
>
>Perhaps in the current market downturn the media's enthusiasm for
>privacy stories is waning. The Privacy Foundation issued a major study
>on an Internet appliance that phones home every night to report
>details of its owners' actions, and the press responded with cursory
>coverage.
>
>The Privacy Foundation spent four months studying the practices of
>TiVo, the maker of high-end video recorders equipped with hard disks.
>Their report claims that TiVo's privacy policy, as described in the
>manual that comes with the appliance, is both misleading and out of
>date with the firm's real practices. After reading the manual a TiVo
>owner would not be aware that the device phones TiVo headquarters
>every night and reports in detail on what shows were watched and
>recorded; the log even includes every button-press on the device's
>remote control.
>
>The Associated Press's D. Ian Hopper got a jump on the story, and many
>outlets used versions of the AP coverage, most abbreviated to only a
>few paragraphs. The Privacy Foundation issued its report on Monday,
>and at least one paper, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, ran a substantial
>portion of Hopper's story on Sunday.
>
>The New York Times featured four slim paragraphs from Reuters, which
>didn't quote anyone at either TiVo or the Privacy Foundation. Coverage
>elsewhere quoted TiVo chief privacy officer Matthew Zinn's spin on the
>report. Judging by the overall thinness of the press coverage, TiVo
>seems to have warded off any serious PR damage so far.
>
>The San Jose Mercury News and USA Today both assigned reporters to the
>story, but neither turned up any new angles. Fox News ran 18
>paragraphs of Hopper's AP story including this summary quote from
>David Burke, author of "Spy TV": "When we have a television in our
>homes observing what we do and running little experiments on us, we're
>either going to get really mad and say that this is too much, or
>conversely, this will be the end of it. Once people have television in
>their homes and get used to the idea that they will be observed, the
>whole issue of privacy is gone." - Keith Dawson
>
>Snooping on the Couch Potatoes
>http://tm0.com/thestandard/sbct.cgi?s=64587893&i=319923&d=1256446
>
>Video Recording Service Compiling Information on Viewers (AP)
>http://www.star-telegram.com:80/news/doc/1047/1:ENTNEWS14/1:ENTNEWS140325101.html
>
>
>Privacy Group Raises Questions About TiVo
>http://www.nyt.com/reuters/technology/tech-tivo-privacy-dc.html
>(Registration required.)
>
>Privacy Foundation Criticizes TiVo Practices
>http://www0.mercurycenter.com:80/premium/business/docs/tivo26.htm
>
>Privacy Organization Hits Recorder Maker
>http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-03-26-ebrief.htm
>
>Report Shows How Video Recorders Watch Consumers (AP)
>http://www.foxnews.com:80/national/032601/tv_privacy.sml
>
>
>
>Copyright 2001 Standard Media International
