Sinclair to Privacy Advocates: Fear Not ATSC 3.0, Since Viewer Data Will Be ‘Anonymized’
Though consumer privacy advocates like Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., raised concerns last week about privacy implications of ATSC 3.0 audience measurement tools (see 1711080052), there’s little to fear because “data analytics” from 3.0 receivers will be “anonymized,” so as not to identify individual viewers, Mark Aitken, Sinclair vice president-advanced technology, told us. Chipset scarcity also will delay commercialization of 3.0 audience measurement tools for “some time,” said Aitken. FCC members are expected to OK 3.0's voluntary deployment Thursday in a 3-2 party-line vote (see 1711140053).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The tools that 3.0 will enable will tell advertisers “what person and where is watching,” said Sinclair Executive Chairman David Smith on a Nov. 1 earnings call (see 1711010054). That 3.0 will provide that capability “on a device-by-device basis, geolocated, once it’s up and running,” will make it the “holy grail” broadcasters have been seeking in terms of better audience measurement, said Smith.
On Dingell’s question in her letter last week to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai whether 3.0 will “permit broadcasters” to collect “personal information” from consumers, such as on age, sex, income or physical addresses, Aitken said 3.0 broadcasters will have access only to data on age, gender and ZIP code, and “only on a basis that the user states a willingness to share.” On Dingell’s asking how broadcasters will be permitted to use that information, “I expect that that’s going to be spelled out in a ULA" if a user chooses to “opt in,” Aitken said of user licensing agreements of the type that are common when consumers activate a smartphone app. As for Dingell’s asking Pai whether consumers will be permitted to opt out of 3.0 data collection, “of course they will,” Aitken said.
Aitken acknowledges “if I know the age and the gender and the ZIP code of a viewer, I know a whole lot that can be cross-referenced to an advertiser in terms of personalized content,” he said. “But personalized doesn’t necessarily mean down to the individual level. There’s a whole host of FTC limitations into what we can ask for, and I think just as importantly, how that data get anonymized.”
Receiver opt-in procedures will be analogous to those of smartphone apps, said Aitken. “As soon as you activate that app, it asks you certain things about the liberties that app can take with regard to the device that you’re authorizing its use on, all the way down to, can we access your GPS location?”
It likely will be “some time” before 3.0 can be used to its fullest capability for audience membership and viewer-data analytics, Aitken said. To draw data from a receiver and feed it back to the broadcaster requires a “back-channel interface,” and no “specific” one exists in the standards, he said. Aitken also conceded Sinclair has made little progress on plans announced a year ago to develop “addressable” receivers that would enable TV stations to “capture significant and meaningful information relating to the consumer’s actual viewing and consumption behaviors” (see 1611020025).
Scarce 3.0 receiver chipset availability for the U.S. is the “bottleneck” thwarting development of addressable receivers for data analytics, said Aitken. Procuring 3.0 receiver chipsets is “exceptionally difficult,” said Aitken. The only chipset available is a “second-spin” LG chipset, “and that’s only been made available to a couple of secondary manufacturers on an extremely limited basis,” and with a 45-day wait, he said. There has been “no practical progress in the area of data analytics coming out of any device due to the fact that we’re just now getting introduced” to chipset availability, he said.
An added "footnote" to scarce 3.0 receiver chipset availability is South Korea gave 3.0 broadcasters there an extra channel "with the stipulation that it only be used for 4K," said Jerald Fritz, executive vice president-strategic and legal affairs at Sinclair's One Media. "Many of the other capabilities enabled by 3.0, including data analytics, are not in the Korean version of the standard as deployed."
For addressable receivers, “the first thing that has to happen is there needs to be a pipeline of chips to develop product around,” said Aitken. “That’s sort of been really the bottleneck. We know that Samsung and LG have chipsets. Samsung’s are not being made available outside of Samsung. LG chipsets are just making their way to some of their proprietary secondary market manufacturers, but none of them are being put into product yet that’s specific to the U.S. market.” LG and Samsung didn’t comment.
Until 3.0 “receiver design kits” become available, and with them “the ability to design the upper-layer, user-experience software interface” that tells the receiver how to “interact” with the consumer, “the implementation of anything” in data analytics or audience measurement will remain "at a standstill,” said Aitken. “We have clear ideas of the simple opt-in process” that would let consumers have a “first-level interaction with a receiver device,” and report back to broadcasters and advertisers data based on users’ ZIP codes, ages and genders, he said. “That data is totally anonymous data because it’s not associated in any way with a direct viewer.”