Gulfstream

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/11/itunes_update_spies_
.html iTunes 6.0.2 phones home to Apple with your listening history? Turns out that it only does this if the “MiniStore” pane is open, but the fact that it does this at all, and never made it particularly clear that it does it, is kinda dodgy.

I do find it interesting, though, that there are people who are upset and concerned about this sort of behaviour, and there are also people who are happy to record their listening history on last.fm—and these are often the exact same people (!). Cory Doctorow, for example (who wrote the Boing Boing post), has voluntarily given last.fm almost 25000 tracks’ worth of his listening history. There are clearly significant differences between the last.fm and iTunes cases, but the practical difference seems slight. For some reason people think they are getting something from sending their listening history to last.fm, but not to the iTunes Music Store. I guess it’s that last.fm seems more … grassroots, open, community centered—but why does this make such a difference? (And can last.fm, Flickr, and so on continue to have this feel?) 13:31