VITAMEDIAS
Tracking your every media move: Technology is hurtling along, offering a wide assortment of Orwellian options to gauge viewing and listening preferences. As with medicine, however, those advances are coming faster than we can sort out their implications and decide just how much information we all want our corporate big brothers to possess.
So enter, in a closely monitored test underway in Philadelphia, the "portable people meter," or PPM. It's a device the size of a pager that people carry around with them, picking up encoded signals in the media they consume. The individuals need do nothing, with the PPM automatically identifying what the users are watching or what radio station they're listening to.
Creepy, you say? Not so, says Arbitron, which is conducting the trial with the cooperation of Nielsen.