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way for Apple to quickly take care of that.

Whew! Thank goodness. I could barely sleep at night.

Please return to Defcon level five at once.

Good move Apple.
Stupid move to have initially implemented it.

after i download 6.02 i had a wtf is this moment, that wasn't there before. i found it to be more annoying than prying. it was easy to turn off once i found the "hide ministore" under edit menu. glad to see that apple has changed this and doesn't assum that users actually want to have this active all the time.

I talked about this with my husband, and we both agree that a little bit of spyware that doesn't harm your computer and actually provides a small benefit is much better than, say, playing a CD on your computer and getting nasty rootkit installed without your knowledge. I was hoping for a system where iTunes could read my ratings and suggest more songs I might like. It doesn't make sense for me to have to re-rate all my songs on something like Last.fm if I've already got them rated in iTunes.

That said, they should have handled the rollout better, something similar to Google Toolbar. When you install it, it tells you right out that if you want to use their advanced features, it will send info back to their server. But before you continue installing it, it gives you that choice to opt out or use the advanced services. Apple should have used a similar model.

From: Ampar --- Please return to Defcon level five at once.


This made me spit my soda on the keyboard. Very funny.

"Good move Apple. Stupid move to have initially implemented it."

Eh. I'm not all that convinced. That's one way I find music is looking at the "what other people bought." So, in that aspect, it's kind of nice. I was doing some iTMS surfing last night and was just thinking about that feature.

But one reason I have yet to download 6.0.2 is this issue. I think it was poor form on Apple's part to even create a question in people's minds about how the information about what you're listening to is used by Apple.

I can't remember what the previous version of the MiniStore was called -- the one that offered suggestions based only on your purchases -- but I was one user who sent a comment to Apple saying that my purchases were NOT characteristic of my entire library and if they really wanted to give me suggestions, they needed to base them on my library and not my purchases. I'm sure that Apple didn't make the change between the MiniStore and its previous incarnation on my recommendation alone, but on a fairly vocal response along those lines.

Being involved in online marketing, one thing is clear to me: consumer behaviors are going to be tracked no matter what the consumer wants. It just doesn't pay not to track this info. Although this sort of information can spawn nuisances, legitimate uses of it actually serve consumers' interests by allowing merchants the ability to target ads/promotions/messages to people who have shown a past interest in the topic of the message.

On <a >Slashdot</a> today is a story about a <a >new HTML attribute Mozilla is introducing</a> that will "ping" tracking servers so that redirect links don't need to be used. The purpose overall is to get merchants the info they need without inconveniencing consumers with the added time redirected pages can take to load. There is some interesting discussion in both places about whether this HTML "feature" should be something users can disable or not.

Bottom line: don't fool yourself into thinking you have privacy if you shop online. You don't. And the only choice you have is to surrender your privacy or choose not to shop online. In the same vein, merchants don't have to sell to you if you refuse to offer your demographic data (but most have more sense not to turn away a dollar). So either don't shop online or educate yourself about what reasonable steps are being taken that serve both consumer and merchant needs and get behind those.

All this privacy bunk...

There's safety in numbers... The chances that someone's going to give a crap about your life info with the billions of transactions daily is infinitely small compared to not buckling your seatbelt.

half way up this molehill. We're hoping to make the summit by Friday.

The mini store helped me in a big way...

I needed album art for my 10,000 song library and have been using http://tpemble.urfbownd.net/itunes/itunes-art-style.php
I started adding the art a few days before the .0.2 release. Now with the mini store I can just right click the album at the bottom of the screen instead of going into the store. I can work twice as fast.

Other than that, it's kinda cool to see what other CD's by the artists I like are on the iTMS.

Thanks Ampar! Now cleaning up my soda.

Ampar said: "Whew! Thank goodness. I could barely sleep at night.
Please return to Defcon level five at once."



The very thought!

Of course we all know this new info is only disinformation. A typical spy tactic.

Don't believe me? Check it out for yourselves:
http://www.leedberg.com/mad/spies/spies.html

What I find cool is how they were able to "fix" this on the server side, without requiring any new downloads. The first thing I thought when I read this was that I'd have to download iTunes again. Nope, it's all taken care of.

I will not be held responsible for soda soaked keyboards or monitors. And don't eat your nano.
That is all.


P.S. Is it o.k. to bring white chocolate into New Orleans? Just curious.

How was the mini store different than what Google Adds does. Its just an add as placement as far as i'm concern. And i turned it off, if i want to see the different albums by the artist i'm listening to i just turn it back on.