Audio Video News

"In George Orwell's novel 1984, everyone had a television in their home that monitored their every move," reads a June 26 report from the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-based advocacy group. Orwell's good citizens dutifully watch, and are watched in turn, their every move tracked and recorded.

That scenario is likely to be replicated in the real world as interactive television develops, according to the cautionary report. By 2005, as many as 41 million American homes may have some form of interactive TV—almost half the presently estimated 98 million TV-equipped homes. Globally, as many as 625 million consumers may have access to ITV. Marketers and program producers will have unprecedented access to private viewing and buying habits, as well as personal financial information, a situation that the CDD views as "a new threat" to personal privacy.

"Every show watched, every ad viewed, every click, and every download becomes fodder for the compilation of data and the creation of user profiles, leading ultimately to pinpoint targeting of ads to individual consumers," the report states. The collection of innocuous marketing data isn't the threat, says the CDD report; it's the fact that each ITV set-top box will reveal its location to monitoring agencies.

"Large amounts of information about customers will be collected and used without their knowledge or, even with their knowledge, without their having the ability to prevent it," the report concludes. At present there are no regulations on interactive television, or on the extraction or use of information gathered through it. The CDD has called on the US Congress to institute privacy laws, a suggestion that is likely to go nowhere.

In late June, the California Assembly defeated a wide-ranging privacy bill that would have severely limited the buying and selling of private financial information by banks and other businesses. The defeat came after days of lobbying and testimony by banking industry executives, who protested that restricting their trade in private information would "wreck" their industry. The CDD report was analyzed June 27 by French news organization Agence France Presse.