Charter Communications Inc. will sell information about the viewing preferences of its cable TV customers, the company announced. Cities served by Charter include Burbank and Glendale. Charter will provide to Nielsen Co. data from subscribers’ digital set-top boxes to give advertisers and TV programmers a clearer picture of the channels and commercials people are watching, the Los Angeles Times reported. No identifying information will be included in the data to protect the privacy of the customers, the Times quoted Jim Heneghan, senior vice president for ad sales for Charter, which is based in St. Louis. “There will be no way to trace the information back to any household,” Heneghan said in a phone interview with the Times. “It will go through our screeners so there is no personally identifiable information. All that they will have is the aggregated anonymous data.”
