The BD-LIVE feature can be used by the movie studios to monitor ones BD viewing.

[HDTV1080P]

The BD-LIVE feature can be used by the movie studios to monitor the Blu-ray discs that one watches

For many years the cable and satellite providers have been able to monitor the channels that consumers like to view. Cable companies can tell what channels are being watched by detecting signal loss on the frequency of the channel being watched and by the use of a two-way QAM Digital cable box. Satellite companies monitor the channels a consumer watches by using the phone line return path and the Ethernet network connection. The satellite receiver calls a toll free number every few weeks in the middle of the night and reports the viewing habits of the subscriber if the network connection is not active.

BD-LIVE can also be used to monitor consumer Blu-ray viewing: It all depends on how the studio wants to use BD-LIVE. Many Blu-ray discs are using the Blu-ray player’s persistent storage when a Blu-ray title is loaded. The internal and external BD-LIVE storage can act like a cookie or movie history database on some Blu-ray titles (The BD-LIVE persistent storage can be cleared by the consumer by clicking a few buttons in the Blu-ray player menu). When a Blu-ray disc is inserted into a modern Blu-ray player with a working BD-LIVE Internet connection the BD-LIVE software connects to the movie studios Blu-ray server. At that moment the movie studio has ones IP address that the Blu-ray player is conneted too and the title of the movie that is being played and possible other disc serial numbers may also be transmitted.

On some Blu-ray titles with BD-LIVE the Blu-ray disc main menu contains information like: Ones local weather, local time, city they live in, and the persons IP address. All of this information is inserted on the main menu screen of select Blu-ray titles to give consumers a unique menu screen to look at before starting the movie.

Without looking at the JAVA and BD-LIVE code for each Blu-ray title it is unknown what the exact information studios are collecting from the persistent storage automatically after inserting a Blu-ray disc. Every time I manually launch BD-LIVE and then login to my free Warner BD-LIVE account, Warner keeps a list of every Warner Blu-ray that I have every watched in any Blu-ray player in the United States. Some would call this feature awesome while others might think it is a privacy issue. If you have a Warner Blu-ray, login to your free BD-LIVE account and instantly that Warner Blu-ray that is inserted is added to the list of Blu-rays that you have watched. Also that list cannot be cleared by the user and it still lists Warner movies that I watched a few years ago. Some studios may decide to collect the movie data automatically every time the Blu-ray disc is inserted since one’s personal IP address connects to the studios BD-LIVE server.

[The_Doctor]

Yep, it's one the things written in to BD people criticized way back when.