I realllllly hate to go back to last week’s cookie discussion, but when I saw this on BoingBoing, I had to pass it along. According to a recent post, iTunes update spies on your listening and sends it to Apple, “A new version of Apple's iTunes for Mac appears to communicate information about every song you play to Apple, and it's not clear if there's any way to turn this off, nor what Apple's privacy policy is on this information.�
In a follow-up post, iTunes: An Update About the Update, Marc of since1968.com (who first reported the story) discusses the objections/explanations people have offered for this new “feature.� From “what did you expect� to “you should monitor your outbound info,� Mark evaluates the explanations and files most of them under “toss up.�
I’ll be watching to see if this story gets legs and, if it does, how Apple gets characterized. Will this “feature� be dismissed as the same kind of enhanced customer experience we’ve come to expect from a top-tier technology company? Or will Apple get spattered with the muck that’s been splashing all over government Webmasters for invading privacy and tracking visitors? Yes, the government is different and needs to be held to different standards. But so is Apple. I can’t wait to see where this lands.
Any predictions?
UPDATE:Macworld reports that Apple discards the personal information the iTunes MiniStore sends to Apple. That's good news, but here's their point:
However, this isn’t about the MiniStore itself. It’s about Apple’s attitude in rolling this change out to the millions of iTunes users, without as much as a peep about what’s going on behind the scenes. Consider, for example, if Microsoft had done such a thing with a minor Office update—say they started collecting data on the names of the files you were editing, in the hopes of selling you preformatted templates to help with future similar projects. If they did this in a minor update, and without telling anyone that the data were being transmitted, there would be universal outrage over this potential attack on our privacy. And now Apple’s gone and done basically the exact same thing.
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