Apple Responds to iTunes Spying Allegations

daveschroeder writes "According to MacWorld and BoingBoing: 'An Apple spokesman (reliable word has it that it was Steve Jobs himself) told MacWorld that Apple discards the personal information that the iTunes Ministore transmits to Apple while you use iTunes. [...] Apple tells us that the information is not actually being collected. The data sent is used to update the MiniStore and then discarded.' Apple also has a knowledge base article, which apparently was available the day iTunes 6.0.2 was introduced, explaining the MiniStore behavior and how to disable it: 'iTunes sends data about the song selected in your library to the iTunes Music Store to provide relevant recommendations. When the MiniStore is hidden, this data is not sent to the iTunes Music Store.'" The discussion about this topic was fast and furious yesterday.

Comments

Re:Damage Control

[Daedala]

This is all very nice, but it doesn't apply to those few people who already have an earlier version of iTunes installed and just ran the updater. There was no warning, no indication, and two DIFFERENT EULAs, neither of which mention Omniture (the third-party company doing this). You can't NOT send information unless you know beforehand to disable the ministore -- as soon as you play your first song (something one often wishes to do in iTunes, for some funny reason), you are sending in information.

They absolutely should have had a dialog box warning users of this. Or including it in the update description. This is a minor update, not something current users should have to go to the website to read up on. Is it pretty obvious what's going on? Sure. But opt-out doesn't work for spam, either.