We want our customers to be in control, give them more relevant advertising, and protect their privacy. In our Baltimore trial, we gave our customers advance notice so they could opt out if they wished. We are using widely available and commonly used geographic and demographic data to separate households into relatively homogeneous, anonymous groups, or segments, that we believe might find a specific commercial more relevant than a generic ad. For example, an advertiser might provide an ad on minivans to households that are more likely to have families, or an ad for a two-door sports car to households that are more likely to have single people in them. This is very similar to how direct mail works.

I want to be clear that we’re not using any click stream data from the cable boxes in customers’ homes and we are not tracking what programs users are watching, or using any other viewing data to determine what ads are delivered. While vendors in this space may be developing technologies with capabilities like collecting clickstream data, that doesn’t mean we’ve chosen to use them – and in fact, we’re not using them. It’s important to us that our customers have a clear picture, because our customers’ privacy is very important to us.