iTunes Phones Home? Surely Not?
Concerns have already been raised about the new iTunes 6.0.2 update, concerns that beckon back to the Sony catastrophe. It was rumored yesterday that the new iTunes feature, iTunes Mini Store, (not referred to in the update description by the way) was in fact “calling home”.
You are not told this is happening, but it’s clear that it must be — the store’s selections change each time you listen to a new song. So at a minimum, artist and title information must be being sent to the music store, each and every time you listen to a new song. I don’t know what other data may or may not be collected, but even just title and artist is enough to concern me.
Long since have worries flared about such capabilities buried within iTunes, however there has never been a recorded case. With the update to the iTunes application yesterday however, the unmentioned “feature” (shown below) was reported to be doing exactly that every time you manually started playing (or changed) tracks. This behavior does not occur when tracks are selected automatically in a playlist. The above quote is from robg of Mac OS X Hints.
It seems there is a work around however. You can simply use on of the three methods of hiding your Mini Store (either by hitting Command+Shift+M, or clicking Edit>Hide Mini Store, or by using the new “hide album art” button located this time on the right hand side of the iTunes window) and it will cease and desist. Good news for all those that are security conscious or don’t like being spied on.
At this time, Apple have yet to comment on the “feature”.
Personal take: My take on the matter was that it should have been mentioned in the update. There is little information on this right now and I have no idea exactly what information Apple is collecting. My suspicion is that they are gathering statistics on what was bought from the iTMS and what wasn’t in your iTunes music collection for purposes only benefitting us as end users. That said, I don’t like being spied on and it would have been nice to have either been warned, or have it turned off by default.
I did leave it open and have a play with it though and it was certainly responding to my song choices. Unfortunately, it seems to want to recommend buying the albums I was playing at the time, such as the Coldplay albums I bought from iTMS less than a month ago. Strange choice there, but perhaps it’s serving a purpose.
