Linked List: January 19, 2016

Tuesday, 19 January 2016

So I signed up to be one of Media Insider (a.k.a. Symphony)’s “insiders”. Turns out they’ll accept anyone. They just make you fill out a form that asks you things like your name, age, income, address, phone number, how many people live in your household, their ages and names, and what kind of TV services you use.

The app is a doozy. It turns on the microphone to listen to what you’re doing “intermittently throughout the day”, requires permission to see and track all of the apps you use on the device, and they want you to turn on their “M-Connect” “feature”, which is a VPN that intercepts all of your network traffic. The installation instructions for iOS are both cumbersome and outdated — and to me seem like a blatant violation of Apple’s enterprise developer rules.

But you might get up to $5 in gift cards a month.

How Symphony Works ★

Here’s a better story on Symphony, by Brade Dale for The Observer:

For the privacy-conscious, Symphony’s app isn’t hidden inside other apps with permissions buried in user agreements no one reads.

Symphony asks those who opt in to load Symphony-branded apps onto their personal devices, apps that use microphones to listen to what’s going on in the background. With technology from Gracenote, the app can hear the show playing and identify it using its unique sound signature (the same way Shazam identifies a song playing over someone else’s speakers). Doing it that way allows the company to gather data on viewing of sites like Netflix and Hulu, whether the companies like it or not. (Netflix likes data)

It uses specific marketing to recruit “media insiders” into its system, who then download its app (there’s no way for consumers to get it without going through this process). In exchange, it pays consumers $5 in gift cards (and up) per month, depending on the number of devices he or she authorizes.

Potential insiders go through an online sign up process that asks them a bunch of questions about their media habits. So Symphony knows a bit more about them.

Still not clear to me if the app is listening to the microphone all the time, even in the background, or if users have to launch the app manually every time they watch TV. If you’re asking yourself how an app like this ever got into Apple’s App Store, the answer is it didn’t. Users have to install it manually with a custom certificate, like a beta.

I think it’s a creepy app, and anyone who would do this for a measly $5 per month is a fool. I also highly doubt that their pool of participants is representative of the general audience.

Meet Symphony, the Company That Tracks Netflix’s Elusive Ratings ★

Wired story by K.M. McFarland:

During an otherwise routine panel at the Television Critics Association Winter press tour this week, NBC research president Alan Wurtzel dropped a bombshell: He knew — or at least had an idea — how many people were watching Netflix’s original series. It was a sit-up-and-pay-attention moment. The head of research for a broadcast network was pulling back the curtain on viewership numbers that had long eluded TV reporters everywhere.

It’s no secret that television networks have long wanted alternatives to the traditional Nielsen ratings. What Wurtzel revealed was that NBC had found one — Palo Alto-based Symphony Advanced Media, which had viewership numbers for Netflix and others. It drew the data from tech that was still “in beta,” Wurtzel said, but it nonetheless showed Jessica Jones averaging 4.8 million viewers aged 18-49 while Master of None had 3.9 million adults in the same group.

This article doesn’t explain who is generating the data, and how. Who are Symphony’s users? How is their app listening to what these users are watching on TV all the time?

I don’t understand why Wired would run this story without answers to these basic questions.

Susan Kare at Layers 2015 ★

From June’s Layers Design Conference in San Francisco, here is Susan Kare’s talk on her history with Apple and icon design, and my interview with her. It was a tremendous thrill to interview someone whose work I love so deeply.