g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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Red Letter Day
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Friday, March 4, 2005
15:33 - Quick! Hide your track names!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6969653/page/2/

(top) link
Via Steven Den Beste: MSNBC's Bob Sullivan finds time to take one of the most useful features of digital music, examine it for dirt, and being unable to find any, shovel some up from his own septic tank and then point at it with winks and nudges.

[Gracenote.com] quietly provides an efficient and important service to digital music users.  There's a common misconception that text-based information like song title, length of play, artist name, and the like, is contained on music CDs.  That's rarely the case. Instead, when a CD is loaded into a computer CD tray, software such as Apple's iTunes automatically calls out across the Internet looking for help identifying the music. The questions are posed to Gracenote's CDDB, or CD database.  By recognizing patterns in the data that is included on the CD -- such as the length of each individual track -- Gracenote figures out what the album is. Then, it transmits data, including music genre, composer name, language, year released, and more, back to the user's computer.

Today Gracenote can recognize about 3.5 million CDs.  And it works so well, most music lovers don't even know it's there. 

That near-anonymity raises some concern among privacy advocates. With the booming popularity of Apple's iPod, and its imitators, Gracenote is accumulating massive amounts of data about consumer listening habits.  But some are wondering if the company, and the various music player manufacturers and software makers, have done enough to inform consumers that information on their musical tastes heads to the Emoryville, Calif. company so often.

. . .

No attempt is made to record precisely who is ripping what CDs, she said. The firm's privacy policy also spells this out clearly.

"We do not use IP addresses for direct marketing purposes and we have neither the desire nor the technology to use IP addresses to identify an individual user by name, address or exact location," it says.  "Furthermore, we delete the IP address when it is no longer needed for security or approximate geolocation purposes."

. . .

Without Gracenote, music fans everywhere would be spending endless hours typing in music cataloging entries themselves.  There's no evidence the firm isn't practicing what it preaches. Still, those with an ear towards privacy concerns -- while admitting Gracenote's utility -- wonder if the firm has done enough to make sure consumers know what's happening.

In other words, Gracenote can look up your IP address from their Web server access log, until it rolls over. Just like with any site. They can't tell where you are or who you are with any more fine-grained detail than knowing what city names show up in a traceroute to your host. It's all free and anonymous, so they can't even track you by Web cookies or user IDs. But that's not good enough: Gracenote might be evil. No proof, of course: just vague accusations and FUD, because it makes a nice two-page story, replete with a misleading poll:

"I think people would feel kinda strange," to learn about Gracenote's data, said Richard Smith, of ComputerBytesMan.com.  "Certainly in the (data) collection process, things are not anonymous.  Being up front about all this stuff is always a good idea."

On the other hand, Smith said, consumers clearly like the features Gracenote provides. "There can be two different reactions: 'How dare they,' and 'Who cares?' "

Consumers do care, said Larry Ponemon of the Ponemon Institute, which studies privacy sentiment among consumers.  In a study of 541 iPod owners conducted recently, 39 percent said they agreed with a statement indicating iPod and Apple were committed to protecting their privacy, but 22 percent said they disagreed, and 40 percent said they were unsure.  Fully one-third said they would stop using their iPod if there was just one security or privacy breach that resulted in the leakage of their personal information; and 80 percent said information about their music tastes was "sensitive information" that "very few people should know about."

How many of that 80 percent had it explained to them by this Pokémon Institute that the dire language of the question was completely at odds with Gracenote's technical inability to locate any person beyond tracerouting their IP?

Gracenote has been a necessary "evil" for years. You gotta get those track names; making users type them all in is an anti-feature, especially once any player in the market has established CDDB access. But there's a quandary for any big company making a digital jukebox app: do you use a public database whose policies you don't have control over? Or do you use an in-house database with a much smaller data store? Back in the Win98 days, the built-in "CD Player" app in Windows looked up track names from an internal Microsoft database, but while its information was usually more accurate than CDDB/Gracenote's (because it wasn't user-contributable), there was far less of it (because it wasn't user-contributable). Evidently WMP has switched over to using Gracenote now; this would seem to indicate that Microsoft decided it was too much hassle to maintain the database internally, while there was a fine (and much more extensive) alternative in Gracenote. Hell, it's worked well enough for iTunes, and it's as much an infrastructural public utility by now as Google is. And how much outrage is there over Google "tracking" your searching habits? They have exactly the same propensity to do so as Gracenote does. More, because media players don't accept Web cookies.

I doubt very much that iTunes users really care that much about the potential that someone's watching when they make a query on a CD's track names and can tell what IP they were using. Enterprising Mac users are going out of their way to write shareware that lets people publish their playlists to HTML, embed their currently playing tracks into their blogs, connect with other iTunes users and share song lists and develop recommendations, and so on. Such people certainly outnumber the ones who would be outraged to hear that Gracenote.com has an Apache access log.

For anyone who happens to be so outraged, though, and who don't mind typing all that track info in themselves, well: it's easy enough to turn off the lookup behavior, whether you use iTunes or any other program with Gracenote access built-in. In iTunes, turn off the "Connect to Internet when needed" checkbox in the General preferences. In WMP, turn off the "Update my music files (WMA and MP3 files) by retrieving missing media information from the Internet" checkbox in the "Media Library" tab of the Options. Not that the article sees fit to mention the ability to do this.

I love how Sullivan says "There's no evidence the firm isn't practicing what it preaches. Still, those with an ear towards privacy concerns -- while admitting Gracenote's utility -- wonder if the firm has done enough to make sure consumers know what's happening." The problem, apparently, is that it's just too dang seamless. Anonymity—the very thing preventing Gracenote from locating you beyond knowing where your ISP is—is being made suspect, as part of a reason not to trust Gracenote's word that it's not stalking you to sell your song lists to the RIAA.

There's always something to get all indignant about, isn't there?


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© Brian Tiemann