Boing Boing: iTunes update spies on your listening and sends it to Apple?
I love iTunes because it's a clean music player. But no amount of clean UI is worth surrendering my privacy for -- I wouldn't buy a stereo that phoned home to Panasonic and told it what I was listening to; I wouldn't buy a shower radio that delivered my tuning preferences to Blaupunkt. I certainly am not comfortable with Apple shoulder-surfing me while I listen to digital music, particularly if they're doing so without my meaningful, informed consent and without disclosing what they intend on doing with that data.Picking up where Cory leaves off, I agree: Apple should have found some way to let customers know what it was doing with iTunes, rather than go the secret opt-in route.
At very least, Apple must deliver information about whether iTunes gathers and transmits your data when the Mini-Store is switched off, and about what it does with the data the Mini-Store transmits when it's loaded.
Turning to the actual feature itself, I'm not sure that there's much of a privacy issue with a "people who bought this song also bought X." Is this any different than the recommendation engine featured on the pages of Amazon.com? I suppose until I know whether or not Apple's keeping a persistent history of my clicks (and associating it, somehow, with personally identifiable information) there's no way of telling. Frankly, anything that helps me discover new stuff I might like would be an improvement over the way the iTunes Music Store sells music and video.
The few clues people have picked up, like the fact that iTunes makes a call to Omniture's web analytics servers, don't really bother me. I used to work in the web analytics and web ad serving business (competing with the likes of Omniture and DoubleClick), and the worst these services do is drop a persistent cookie on your machine that tracks your clicks on a given web site. They have your IP address, your browser/OS combo, some information about your browser setup (Java or JavaScript support, etc) and they may possibly also use geolocation services to establish your rough whereabouts. I suppose there's the remote chance that Omniture may correlate your clicks on Apple.com properties with clicks on other site where they're the analytics tool of choice (such as eBay), but that would depend on whether Apple was interested in sharing that information, and I can't see why that would be the case.
Where this may get a little tricky is when you're logged in to the iTunes Music Store. They could possibly relate a cookie (which in turn relates to a browsing or clickstream history over time) to an account ID. This means your clicks could be cross referenced against your purchases, and tied to a name, address, email, and phone number. IIRC this iTunes account ID is also your Apple ID, which means that Apple could relate iTMS purchase and clickstream data to Apple Store online purchases, product registrations, posts to their support discussion groups, .Mac activity. Seems far-fetched, though.
