Charter, Cox, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Comcast and Bright House Networks are collaboratively working on a new advertising system they've dubbed "Canoe." The effort will attempt to make TV advertising more interactive and user (or neighborhood) specific, based on range of factors. To store all this data, Comcast is supposedly building a 500 terabyte "data warehouse," which will be able to hold a full year of somewhat anonymous statistics gathered from digital set-tops in more than 16 million households.

An early Comcast trial is ongoing in the Baltimore market, where a recent letter sent to customers calls this "addressable advertising," which will "increase the relevancy of the TV advertising seen by our Digital Cable subscribers." According to the e-mail, the data used to determine which ads users will see is based on "standard, widely available demographic information."

According to the New York Times, Cablevision has been testing their own targeted advertising technology for the past year and a half on 150,000 customers in Brooklyn, and will soon expand the "service" across 500,000 homes in Brooklyn, the Bronx and some New Jersey areas. According to the Times, Cablevision's system will be more specific than Comcast's neighborhood-based approach, targeting customers with ads based their "income, ethnicity, gender or whether the homeowner has children or pets." The data is obtained via Experian.

As you might expect, this foray into a brave new advertising world has privacy and consumer advocates (and probably lawyers) watching these developments carefully, despite assurances from cable carriers that all data is anonymous. Transparency could be an issue: Cablevision tells the Times that customers aren't being alerted specifically that they're now being advertised to based on their income, skin color and/or dog's nutritional needs, though the Cablevision privacy policy does mention it. Sort of:The broadband behavioral advertising business blew up in carriers' faces because they didn't clearly inform customers about what was happening. That led to a Congressional and media firestorm, despite the fact that ISPs had been selling user browsing (clickstream) data for years. That sort of backlash could happen here, too, should a lawmaker get a bee in their bonnet about the issue when they finally discover it -- several years from now.