The core of many of our services is the way they are tailored and personalised to each customer's preferences. To be able to provide our viewers with the possibility to stream their favourite content on Viaplay, we need to process personal data, in addition to aggregated and statistical data. In particular, we may process information about how our customers behave on our services – so called ‘behavioural data’ – to be able to provide a personalised streaming and content experience or to optimise our services.
We may process information about what content our customers are watching, including where they started and stopped watching specific content, how they navigate on the platform, their profile, device and geolocation. This behavioural data is used among other to provide personalised features in our service, such as giving our customers the possibility to continue watching where you last left a stream (“continue watching”), or suggest content that might be interesting based on the customer's viewing behaviour (“you might also like”).
To achieve the personalisation purpose in Viaplay, viewers’ pseudo-anonymised user IDs and their associated viewing history are processed by a machine-learning algorithm. In this way, the algorithm can predict what other content could be interesting (e.g., “you might also like…”) to a viewer, by learning from other viewers who have similar interests. At all times, the behavioural data is separated from directly personally identifiable information in the customer profile and linked solely to the pseudo-anonymised user ID.
When processing personal data for achieving the purpose of improving our services, we do not need to know who the customer is. This is why we anonymise the behavioural data as soon as technically possible without infringing on the purpose. When anonymised, the behavioural data allows us to evaluate how large groups of customers respond to our content. This helps us get an idea of what people like and dislike, which allows us to make our sites and services better and provide content that our customers are more likely to enjoy.
We also use personal data for marketing purposes. Subject to legal requirements, our customers may receive emails and other types of notifications regarding content we believe they would enjoy, or offers related to our services. Behavioural data may also be used to market our services and content towards others, but not in a way that requires us to identify an individual. For example, the data can be narrowed down, and hence anonymised, to geographical-only data that helps us understand what kind of content is popular where, and ensure that the content is marketed accordingly. Subject to legal requirements, we also process data to be able to show advertisements that may be of interest for our customers. If advertisements are targeted through the use of data collected via cookies, it is possible at any time to deny the use of cookies, which will lead to us serving advertisements without any tailoring to the customer's interests.