Television networks and advertising companies already do a lot of monitoring of our television habits but for the most part the current methods are archaic given all the technology we have but a new company in San Francisco looks to change all that.

The company, Flingo, has come up with a technology referred to as “Sync Apps” that TV companies are hoping to feature in televsions buy the end of the year and it looks to change how our television usage is monitored. I twill be able to report your viewing to websites and online advertisers in realtime.

Here’s how it works:

 A television equipped with Sync Apps keeps tabs on everything you’re watching in real time (this could be anything from cable television, to DVDs, to video files shared over your home network). Then Sync Apps sends the information to a server that identifies whatever you’re watching. Computers, laptops, tablets, mobile devices — anything sharing the same network connection as your television — can then tap into that information to display relevant web content on the fly. If the channel on your television changes, so does what you see on the web. And here’s where the money is: Data collected and analyzed by Sync Apps will also be made available to social networking sites and advertising companies.

via io9

While this technology can supposedly turned off by the consumer I still get a bad feeling when I read about technology like this.

A technology that monitors your television usage isn’t science fiction anymore is a post from: The Inquisitr

With great hoopla British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the government would be scrapping its massive ‘big brother’ database meant to be used to monitor the country’s citizens.

“The government recognised the privacy implications of the move [and] therefore does not propose to pursue this move,” she said.

Grabbing favourable headlines, Smith announced that up to £2 billion of public money would instead be spent helping private internet and telephone companies to retain information for up to 12 months in separate databases.

Source: Times Online

There’s only one problem with her promise – it’s a load of crap. In fact the British government besides handing money over to the ISPs has allocated and additional £1 billion for the new program called “Mastering the Internet” (MTI). This program will rely on thousands of ‘black box’ probes covertly inserted across the online infrastructure.

Part of all this is the building of a massive new complex for GCHQ, the agency responsible for the implementation of MTI, and will contain a huge room of super-computers that will help them monitor and record all the data passing through those black boxes.

The new GCHQ internet-monitoring network will shift the focus of the surveillance state away from a few hundred targeted people to everyone in the UK.

“Although the paper [work] does not say it, its clear implication is that those kinds of probes should be extended to cover the entire population for the purposes of monitoring communications data,” said the industry source.

Source: Times Online

So one hand you have a government official grabbing good press by saying they are stopping their surveillance program. Then on the flip side you have that same government spending money on an even more subversive monitoring system to watch what all their citizens are doing online.

Sounds about right.

British government outed in plan to spy on citizens is a post from: The Inquisitr

The company says it’s “carefully considering” a Web monitoring initiative, according to information just obtained by the New York Times. The revelation came in a letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which had questioned several ISPs about their privacy practices.

AT&T, in contrast to other providers, said it would like to look into such a program for its advertising system — though as of now, execs say, they have no such system in place. AT&T did say it would most likely consider an “opt in” scenario rather than an “opt out” one, meaning you would have to actively agree to have your Web habits tracked.

Why, we might ask, would anyone possibly sign up for that?

AT&T May Start Monitoring You is a post from: The Inquisitr