iTunes Advertisements
by in The Lab on Wednesday, January 11, 2006
New iTunes ads when I’m in my own private playlists? How long before they’re based on what kind of (possibly pirated) music I have?
Honestly, I can’t remember seeing these before so I assume they’re new since the update I just downloaded today. Perhaps they were just disabled. In any case, I’m wondering if the progression will be toward a Google-like analyzation of my playlists and a display of relevant media that I might be most inclined to purchase at the iTunes Music Store.
This is especially interesting since, as we all know, you don’t necessarily have all iTunes music in your iTunes library. I have a TON of songs, days and days worth. What other data mining might be done? It would be interesting to know what people are playing and how often. Think of what the music industry would pay for that kind of information.
Update:
So, I looked into this further. Apparently I’m late in my observation, as there’s already a few articles about it. Specifically, this Boing Boing article which describes the latest iteration of iTunes as “spyware.”
After upgrading, users will notice a new mini store option in the main iTunes panel that will automatically update a selection of songs for sale in the iTunes music store based on whatever you are listening to in iTunes, whether it was purchased via iTunes originally or not.
Update 2:
With the Mini-Store turned off, no data is passed back to Apple. Verified with Little Snitch and Ethereal. Further, TCPFlow was used to check the outgoing data and it only queried the server when the pane was open.
For regular audio tracks that you might have in your library, it will run a full text search to find related articles and deliver related information, for purchased music it searches by the original product ID used in the Music Store. Also, iTunes doesn’t seem to send information to Apple when you are playing music, but rather when you click on a song. So if you start playing a song by double-clicking, it will send the data to the iTunes Music Store and retrieve suggestions. If the song is in a playlist however, the Mini Store display will not change when the next song begins.
Merlin reports that iTunes appears to be phoning 2o7.net when the Mini Store is open.
2o7.net is an Internet domain used by Omniture, Inc. on behalf of our customers to improve Web site design and to generally improve the user experience on the Web. This domain is used by Omniture’s data collection systems, and is the domain under which Omniture places cookies. These cookies are NOT spyware – they are simple text files that help Omniture customers measure usage of their Web sites and performance of their marketing campaigns.
Push the “Close Mini Store” button on the bottom bar of iTune to turn this off…..
Big deal
That’s not really the point and I refer you to this “Snappy comebacks to Apple apologists” post.
With risk of being called an “Apple apologist” I really don’t see the big fucking deal. Did it irritate me? Yeah, but because I saw it as an ad taking up space where my library should be. The privacy implications people are screaming about and you allude to are a joke.
Most people (not you) seem horribly uninformed about this. For example, the genius you linked to (Snappy comebacks…) says “iTunes collects data about the music I’m currently playing and sends it to the iTunes Music Store”. This isn’t the case which you point out yourself in “Update 2″.
Also, I sincerely doubt they’re collecting that data in any personally identifying way. Just the volume of data would be overwhelming (every click in the library or every iTunes user). Any storage of this data is very likely happening in aggregate form (12 million people clicked on “Grandma got run over by a reindeer).
Overall it’s a minor issue and if you consider tracks in your iTunes library sensitive information, increase the dosage.
Rich,
I also seriously doubt they’re collecting actual user data. Just song data and somewhat broad statistical data mining. But still, think of the value of that data.
To a certain extent iTunes is a huge part of the iTunes music that was purchased at the store long after you have left the Music Store. So, I’ve bought my song, I have left the Music Store, the record company now has that statistic but that’s not good enough. Now we would *like* to know how many times it’s actually be playing (and of course, it’s always nice to be able to sell a similar song).
Most people seem to be concerned that Apple is wanting to push more product on them — well duh, who wouldn’t? Everyone has been doing this, Amazon was the first in like 92. What I’m more interested in is the enormous amount of data that Omniture, Inc. uses to develop strategies for record and media companies.
Is it the end of the world? No, I already turned it off obviously. But I’m not really too fond of participating in a constant survey. That’s all I’m saying.
Yeah, I’m a little bit disturbed by it, but I didn’t find out about the whole “we’re collecting usage information” issue until after I’d already turned off the ministore. Since it never affected me because I’d never played a song with the ministore enabled, I wasn’t terribly concerned about my privacy having been infringed upon. But I can’t say that I’m fond of Apple using this particular method of marketing. There was a time when Apple was registering every click through an ad service (I can’t remember the name of it; started with an “a”) but have since stopped. I wasn’t too happy with that, though, and lived for some time with no images on Apple’s site because those images, which were being served by that company’s ad server, were being blocked by my ad-blocking software. Apple keeps dipping their toe into this sort of invisible usage-tracking, and after awhile I’m guessing that either the mini-store will go away, not be enabled by default, or will no longer use this method of information tracking. But Apple’s never been too big on transparency when it comes to usage-tracking.
On the other hand, when looked at from the standpoint of a futurist, doesn’t this actually sound like the promise of the web when the public was first being sold on it back in the early 90s? I mean, it just KNOWS what you like and will offer you things like that. That’s kind of cool. But after seeing movies like Minority Report, my opinion on whether or not that would be the kind of world in which I’d want to live has taken a turn for the latter.
Blah. I’m rambling. I need to go home. Later.
I just got my 2000t and all of my songs are skipping in iTunes, and I cant figure out why. If someone could help me out and tell me how to fix this I would really appreciate it because its driving me crazy. Thanks for the replys.
[...] panic when Apple released a new version iTunes which had a suggestion box. In an old post of mine, iTunes Advertisements, I talked a bit about how I didn’t really like the idea since Apple is in bed with record [...]