IP: WebTV

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 98 09:13 PDT
From: lauren@vortex.com (Lauren Weinstein)
To: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu
Subject: WebTV
Cc: lauren@vortex.com

Hi Dave.  Thanks for your kind words regarding the most recent
PRIVACY Forum Digest.

I assume you saw yesterday's reports where WebTV's President
"announced" that they've apparently been using hidden mechanisms
within the WebTV system to backchannel user web browsing and
television viewing data back to WebTV, then providing aggregate
info (down to zip code granularity, apparently) to advertisers.
Supposedly the plan is to "improve" that granularity down to
individual users so that specific ads can be targeted to specific
persons, though they've suggested there will be an opt-out feature
for that.  

Obviously, all of the concerns that I've expressed over Netscape's
"What's Related" backchannels applies to Microsoft's WebTV as well.
In fact WebTV, while it involves far fewer users right now, apparently goes
a couple of steps further by actually providing data to advertisers,
and by also tracking TV viewing habits.  This could become a very,
very big issue as next generation digital cable TV boxes are
deployed on a large scale, many of which will contain Windows CE / WebTV.

It's clear that firms are using whatever technology they can muster
to monitor the activities of their users, with little thought to 
the privacy implications.  

The WebTV announcement was done with a very positive spin, emphasizing how
wonderful their monitoring of users was to improve the delivery of
interesting advertising.  There has been speculation that perhaps the
announcement was triggered by my recent PRIVACY Forum reports on Netscape,
as someone at WebTV decided that they'd be better off doing as benign an
announcement on this issue as possible before an "expose" appeared.  I
obviously can't judge if this is true, but the timing is certainly
interesting.

Feel free to pass this message along if you wish.  Thanks.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
Moderator, PRIVACY Forum
http://www.vortex.com