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iTunes privacy fears?
June 2, 2007
Proof of purchase or sinister music industry plot? That is the question being pondered tonight by customers of Apple’s iTunes music store. News that Apple has hidden personal information such as full names and emails in the tracks purchased from iTunes has created something of a stir. While it’s true that Apple didn’t make a point of telling people it was including such information in their music files, Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter research suggests that privacy concerns are overblown:
It’s a pretty common practice to identify stuff like this as proof of purchase and other stores do this as well. Apple has always embedded this information from day one and it’s very easy to see. Other vendors likewise do the same thing. The reasons are many why you might want to be able to tell which songs on a users hard drive came from your store for things like promotions and or upgrade offers. If you’re really concerned there’s plenty of ways to remove the information.
Of course, embedding personal information in Apple’s new DRM-free tracks also means it would be easy to trace them back to their original owner should they end up on file-sharing sites. So what’s the bottom line? As ArsTechnica puts it: "Sharer beware." The rest of us should have little to worry about.
Even without being an expert, I cannot see too far the day some open source piece of software will strip any digital song free of the information in question. Most probably it will come as some conversion software whereby one can “move” round digital content form one format to the next.
How could one do this? Let’s say some bit arithmetic between the digital versions of the same song might well do…
Posted by: fCh | June 2nd, 2007 at 2:18 am | Report this comment