Not content with angering many of its customers by throttling and tracking their Internet usage, Comcast now wants to put special cameras into customers’ homes so that it can tell who’s in the living room.

The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes.

While this is eerily reminiscent of 1984, we could still have the right to put some black, electrical tape onto the camera’s lens, as well as outright refuse to have anything to do with Comcast in our homes.  Unfortunately, as with most cable companies, they have a monopoly in the area, which means a refusal of Comcast is a refusal of TV and the Internet for most.

Kunkel said the system wouldn’t be based on facial recognition, so there wouldn’t be a picture of you on file (we hope). Instead, it would distinguish between different members of your household by recognizing body forms. He stressed that the system is still in the experimental phase, that there hasn’t been consumer testing, and that any rollout “must add value” to the viewing experience beyond serving ads.

If it can recognize forms, it can recognize what those forms are doing in the living room as well.  Do we really want that type of technology in our homes?