Thursday, January 12, 2006

iTunes Music Store mini browser paranoia

"iTunes is spyware" made a long list of talk in slashdot yesterday, and not only at slashdot.
Today it got more clarifications.

iTunes mini store browser sends anonymous data of what you listen, to feed you with what you could like to listen more. So?

The same people who bitch about that are those who wipe their Frequent Flyers high mileage clubs cards every time they fly; they use their CVS and Walgreen's cards every time they shop there, so Walgreen knowing exactly what brand of asthma medicines they use, when they bought a pregnancy test or lime flavored condoms the last time, or how much gatorade they buy; they have no issues with AmEx, Visa, and Mastercard knowing exactly what they buy, how much, when, where, thus knowing a whole lot more of where their money goes, which are exactly their shopping patters and perversions, and they never ever doubt AmEx or Visa, or American Airlines, or any partner Finnair, CVS, Kodak, Alitalia, or anything else out there, would use the data they have for anything... like marketing.

Those people concerned or worried about their privacy, could have used Little Snitch to start with, with their computer.

And they should pay only with cash in the real life. And even then, the stores they buy may notice that they buy weird stuff.

Maybe one of the fears was them being revealed for using P2P networks for obtaining the music. But that is not in the metatags or in id3 tags the mp3 or aac use.

So their Visa, Amex, and Virgin Megastores know that they have bought 5 CDs of Britney Spears. iTunes background data could have seen they were listening to one track of Britney Spears (or anything else hideous or they would not want to admit to be listening to) and could not tell how it was received.

Such a big deal.