Mike Binder ought to have it pretty good. He’s a successful actor and producer who has a show on HBO called “The Mind of the Married Man.” Mike has one problem, though: TiVo thinks he’s gay.

TiVo, despite the sound of the name, isn’t some trendy Lithuanian hairdresser. TiVo is a nifty little gadget that works sort of like a VCR. Instead of a videotape, however, TiVo has a big honkin’ hard drive, like the one in a home computer. This gives TiVo some interesting capabilities.

For instance, you can be watching a show, hit a button on TiVo, and the show will pause. When you hit the button again, it’ll pick up where you left off…and play the whole show through to the end, even if it wasn’t over when you started it back up. How? Beats me. But they say it works. If you have a special subscriber service, it also can check the schedule and tape your favorite show, even if the schedule changes.

But the feature that got Mike in trouble was TiVo’s ability to save a list of what you’ve recorded in its little silicon brain and use that information to build a list of your preferences. Then it takes it upon itself to record shows that it “thinks” you’ll like.

Which is what happened to Mike (and several other folks, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal). In 1999, Mike wrote and produced a little movie called “The Sex Monster,” an alleged comedy about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. Mike thought, understandably, that it might be nice to have a recorded copy of his own work around the house.

So he recorded it. Aha! TiVo decided. Mike must like stuff with gay themes. So it started recording shows like Showtime’s gay drama “Queer as Folk,” Cher concerts, and the like. Mike got a little unnerved by this, and began “counterprogramming” TiVo with the Playboy Channel and Baywatch. This worked great, until his wife turned on the TiVo and found the list of the stuff he’d been recording. Mike did the only thing a guy like him can do in a situation like that: he turned the whole incident into an episode of his show.

Lest you think that TiVo just suffers from an obsession with gays, consider the case of Lukas Karlsson. Lukas decided he didn’t want TiVo recording religious shows, so he went through the onscreen list of such shows and marked them with a thumbs down” on the screen, indicating a lack of interest in that type of programming. Unfortunately, that led TiVo to conclude he was an ax murderer and download nothing but creepy slasher movies.

To counterprogram, he started downloading cooking shows. That seemed to soften TiVo’s opinion. I guess he’s lucky it didn’t start giving him movies about cannibalism. (Of course, if my e-mail is any indication, my own expressed opinions on religious subjects have led some people around here to conclude that I’m the moral equivalent of an ax murderer. Maybe some of the TiVo programmers live around here.)

Consumer profiling is nothing new. It’s what drives most sales of mailing lists, wherein companies buy, for example, the subscriber list of Field and Stream, so they can send you catalogs for fishing gear. But with the increasing use of computers in all walks of life, consumer profiling has gone high tech and become a central part of marketing.

If the computers can keep track of what you read, watch, and listen to the theory goes, they can know what you like and pitch you the stuff you’ll be most receptive to. So you get features like the recommendations page on the mail-order book site Amazon.com, which analyzes the list of what you’ve ordered, cross-references it with what other people with the same interests have ordered, and coughs out a list of recommendations the next time you visit the site.

But every now and then, the profilers run up against the First Law of Computers: Computers are incredibly stupid.

They have a certain set of rules to follow in order to carry out their assigned tasks, and they’re going to follow those rules whether they make sense or not. It’s a lot like high school, or the DMV.

So you get some bizarre tales. Like that of Ray Everett-Church of Fremont California. Ray actually is gay, but when he ordered a book on pregnancy for a friend who was expecting, Amazon apparently decided he was a gay pregnant man. (That’s got to be the smallest target market in publishing.)

In the long run, though, it’s some comfort that TiVo and like-minded services are a little bit stupid. I mean, think about it. How well do you really want your TV to know you?