We know what you’re downloading from Apple’s iTunes Store. According to research from MIT, the iTunes Store can reveal what content another person has downloaded, opening up a can of privacy worms for many.
The iTunes Stores allows users to give content, including music, to other users, but it wants to make sure you’re not paying for content they already own. To help you out, iTunes allows users to compile a list of up to 100 songs to give to someone else and then the service checks to see if they already own the content.
Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at MIT, said “This is done with good intentions — to keep users from gifting music that the recipient already has — but the implementation of this feature opens up privacy concerns: if the check reveals duplicates, iTunes tells the gifter about one of them.”
The part where privacy becomes an issue is the verification process for all of this: all iTunes needs is an e-mail address attached to a receiver’s iTunes account. Apple doesn’t require the giver to sign in to an account or present any credit card information, nor does it inform the receiver that their account has been scanned.
“This strikes me as problematic,” McAfee said. “Of course, this is nowhere near as big a deal as privacy holes in online health or financial information would be, so we should keep this issue in perspective. But it is an issue, I think.”
The true problem arises when looking into how easy it is to automate the process of scanning a person’s library. According to boasts on developer Web forums and chat rooms, it already has been successfully automated, though no one has said they’re keeping the data — that is until they find someone to whom to sell the process.
McAfee also said that the gifting procedure could be in violation of the US Video Privacy and Protection Act, which bans disclosure of customer rental records without their consent.
McAfee said that a better model is something more akin to Amazon’s Kindle ebook gifting. If a user receives a book they already own, Amazon simply gives them a credit toward their account for a future purpose.
Google will launch its Google Music service in tandem with its release of Android Honeycomb, according to a Motorola executive speaking at the Mobile World Congress.
According to The Guardian, Motorola Mobility chief Sanjay Jha said the benefits of having the Xoom tablet run Honeycomb is that it “adds video services and music services,” direct from Google. “If you look at Google Mobile services [via Android] today, there’s a video service, there’s a music service — that is, there will be a music service,” Jha told the paper.
Google Music has been rumored for a while even with a leaked logo appearing and then disappearing from Google’s servers last year. It got a fuller discussion at the 2010 Google I/O conference where Google said the eventual goal was to allow users to stream music on PCs to an Android mobile (and now perhaps a tablet for either function), plus the ability to purchase music in the Android Market and send it to phones or other devices.
As far as a music service, at that time Google would only say that its focus was on “delivering better apps” but that over time the industry would “see that strategy more broadly unfold.”
Google is expected to be building upon its music search foundation, specifically an October 2009 service where it partnered with Myspace, Rhapsody, Lala and imeem (the last two have since shuttered) and displayed links to those services and their content in its search results.
In the long line of recent changes and shakeups at Myspace, the arrival of Myspace Select in the UK may be the company’s best hope to move beyond its sordid past.
Myspace Select is a new Web site that will back new and emerging artists, starting off with Misty Miller, Mirrors and Jessie J in the UK. Myspace said the Select site will give these and other chosen acts “the same level of editorial and marketing support afforded to global superstars, with the intention of boosting their profiles and sharing their music as widely as possible.”
This support will likely follow Myspace’s traditional marketing and include hosted videos and albums, editorials with key ad placement covering both albums and singles, and a live streamed concert or session that will appear on Myspace’s home page.
In January, financial losses at the News Corp branch housing Myspace were revealed as having grown from $30 million in 2009 to $156 million in 2010.
Aspiro has joined with Canal Digital in Norway to roll out a new music offering to Canal’s roughly 700,000 digital TV customers. The pair will offer Apsiro’s WiMP music service bundled into standard TV subscriptions. Aspiro said the deal will be worth around 50 million SEK ($7.8 million) over the next 18 months.
“This partnership is groundbreaking, and is to our knowledge one of the largest of its kind,” wrote CEO Gunnar Sellaeg. “It’s also an important step in the right direction for our industry that a TV-distributor bundles music with its core offerings.”
The key for the service is the bundling aspect. While many music services have been made available through TV sets, very few so far have had their pricing included with standard subscription packages.
This news comes roughly one week after Aspiro expanded its mobile services to Norway via Telenor. Up next appears to be an expansion of its service in Denmark.
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