Well this one sat me back in the seat. Did you know that the latest version of iTunes calls home and tells Apple what you listening to. Seeing that your logged in to your account most of the time when iTunes is loaded how do you like the thought that iTunes is sending your playlist back to Apple HQ and then they in turn are targeting ads at you.
So it seems that Apple is joining Sony in being very bad net citizens, at the very least they are invading the privacy of 20+ million iTunes users. I am sure we are going to hear a lot more on this and hopefully Apple will have learned from the Sony fiasco and come out and admit that they are wrong and how they are going to fix it like yesterday.
I bet their are a lot of pissed of Mac fanatics today to consider that their beloved company would start spying on their activities. [BoingBoing]
I did a little experimentation, and I found some interesteing things.
1) iTunes doesn’t report on what you are listening to, but what the currently selected track is.
2) The servers that iTunes connects to are not Apple’s. They appear to be some other company.
I put the deails in this post:
http://www.paulstimesink.com/post/2006/01/11/itunes_security_with_ministore
If you simply disable the mini store (Edit: Hide Ministore, or just Shift-Command-M), then no data is transmitted. There you have it, you can go back to listening to iTunes paranoia free.
Todd,
This is sort of like when I went to the Amazon and bought your book, Amazon then thought I wanted to buy everything else out there that was podcasting related… I do not think you minded them do that. But it was your book involved at Amazon and here is the one company you hate more then any other.. Apple.
They messed up big time plain and simple. I am not the only one calling them out. I don’t hate Apple it’s funny that you say that it really is. Part of the reason is you cannot handle it when the are criticized justily
I could have told you immediatly that data is being sent to Apple. Why? How else does the music know what to display? Duh! I understand that there could be privacy issues, but my surpise is that the tech industry go all up in arms when this is the only way it CAN work. I am a bit annoyed over this last outrange about the iTMS. Are programmers that dumb or are these just the wanna-be geeks that really don’t know how much of the internet works?
All I was waiting on is clarity from Apple on if they stored it or not. I do trust Apple (not blindly) so I am not worried. Besides, I wouldn’t mind them giving me new suggestions for music.