Detection of content display observers with prevention of unauthorized access to identification signal

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The invention enables and/or facilitates the display of personalized content to content observers by content providers (e.
g.
, advertisers) who disseminate content over a network.
In particular, the invention can be used to enable the display of targeted content to television viewers.
The invention can be implemented for use with a television network by having a set top box (or similar television control device) with processing capability connected to each of multiple televisions on the network.
A large variety of targeted content can be stored on data storage devices at each location of a content display device (e.
g.
, data storage devices associated with television set top boxes).
The "intelligent" set top boxes can be used to track the viewing habits of each viewer and to make decisions regarding which of the variety of targeted content to display to each viewer.
The local storage and decision-making overcomes limitations of previous systems for delivering and displaying targeted content to observers.
The invention can enable identification of particular content observers at a content display site to facilitate the display of targeted content to those content observers.
Such identification can be accomplished using one or more devices for acquiring data regarding an aspect of the environment of the content display device, wherein the presence of the content observer in the vicinity of the content display device when the content observer is observing the content display device can be detected from the acquired data.
For example, data can be acquired regarding one or more physical characteristics of a content observer present in the vicinity of the content display device during the display of content using, for example, a visual data acquisition device such as a camera, an audio data acquisition device such as a microphone, a fingerprint scanning device and/or a retinal scanning device.
The use of such data acquisition device(s) can be implemented so as to alleviate privacy concerns of content observers by inhibiting unauthorized access to signal(s) produced by those data acquisition device(s) and processing devices used to identify content observer(s)