John Gruber has been investigating how NBC president Alan Wurtzel had an idea of how many people watched Netflix shows, it turns out he’s using figures drawn from Palo Alto-based Symphony Advanced Media’s “Media Insider” app. It works like so:

It turns on the microphone to listen to what you’re doing “intermittently throughout the day”, requires permission to see and track all of the apps you use on the device, and they want you to turn on their “M-Connect” “feature”, which is a VPN that intercepts all of your network traffic.

Oh wow. They get people to sign up for this by marketing and offering gift cards.