media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Is Walmart Watching You?

(Oct. 6, 2011)  Here in Humboldt County, many people are worried that Walmart has acquired a lease to open a store in the Bayshore Mall, though we have heard no official acknowledgement of that.

I’m more worried about some other Walmart acquisitions. In September it acquired OneRiot, which is a company that sends customized and targeted ads to people via social networking. Last year it bought a movie distribution company called Vudu which owns rights to thousands of movies and embeds technology in new televisions that allows you to download those movies without a cable or Internet hookup. And according to technology news site CNET, Walmart is about to adopt a technology called UltraViolet — which will allow people web access to movies they buy at a Walmart store.

Here’s why these acquisitions bother me. Until 2007, I went to the same hair cutter for years. Then I watched The Bourne Ultimatum and saw how effortlessly Julia Stiles cut her own hair. She looked great! That prompted me to try it myself. Now, I knew I had watched a fictional character in a carefully choreographed movie scene. It didn’t matter. Watching Julia Stiles do it so beautifully prompted me to copy her. I still cut my own hair. While watching TV last night I got caught up in an ad for the Sharper Image Superwave oven and had to fight the urge to order it on the spot. It cooks perfect steaks in 12 minutes and cleans itself!

We know that what we watch affects what we buy. But more than that, what we watch often affects what we do. And never before has every purchase we make, every image we view, and every song we listen to been so tabulated and aggregated and analyzed. When we watch movies on television we ignore the disclaimer at the beginning that says the movie was edited for content and to fit the screen. The next logical step is that it could be edited for content to fit your particular screen. What we buy may affect what we watch.

When I lived in San Francisco, we’d rent movies from an alternative video store. But we would forget what movies we’d already rented. Art movie houses offer great collections of cheesy sci-fi movies from the ‘50s, and all those space monster movies look the same. After the third time renting The Brain From Planet Arous I worried what someone would think if he looked at my rental history. Nowadays I watch movies via DirecTV. It’s ridiculous to worry that some worker at DirecTV peeks at my viewing habits. It’s a computer that does that.

In September, DirecTV signed a deal with a company called Miso, which syncs digital devices like the iPad with TV sets. With Miso, when people watch movies or television shows, their iPads shoot them related stuff — information about the soundtrack, the clothes the characters are wearing, the cars they drive.

The movies I download onto my DVR or that my dad Netflixes are just a tiny part of the media tracked by computers. About the only untracked media you consume is the newspaper you are now reading, and only if you picked the paper up at the market. If you read it online, you’re not the only one who knows.

Amazon knows every book I buy on my Kindle or iPad2 and every time I highlight a sentence in one of those books. Back in the late ‘70s I read Lord of the Rings about five times. Maybe more. How valuable might that information have been to businesses that wanted to sell me clothes or other books or movies or get me to watch their TV shows? What if some company aggregated all my teen reading and viewing and listening patterns — reads Tolkien and Agatha Christie, watches Burt Reynolds movies and the Mary Tyler Moore show, listens to Pat Benatar — to find the 530,212 other kids who had exactly the same preferences? Maybe it would label us Group A173. What might it do with that info?

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