Apple criticized for embedding names, e-mails in songs
It used to be that music fans believed cryptic messages about Satan or the death of a band member were hidden within rock albums. — Nowadays, the secrets buried in digital music are way too easy to find, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands one day after the anger over Apple's new DRM-free iTunes tracks, where buyers discovered the unlocked files carry purchaser-identifying data — names and e-mails — that would expose anyone whose copy surfaces on a file-sharing network. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now made that finding a formal criticism of Apple.
It also echoes an older thread: a January 2006 Boing Boing report that an iTunes update appeared to transmit listening data to Apple had already put the store's data practices under scrutiny. What changed this week is that the identifier is baked into the file itself, so it travels wherever the track does.
First-order effects
- Buyers of Apple's DRM-free tracks now own files tagged with their name and e-mail address, meaning any future leak to file-sharing sites identifies them rather than just the track's origin.
Second-order effects
- Privacy advocates like the EFF gain a concrete artifact to campaign against, forcing Apple to defend watermarking at the very moment its DRM-free launch was meant to answer critics of locked music.
Third-order effects
- If identity-embedded files become the standard trade for removing digital locks, the industry's shift away from DRM swaps copy-protection for traceability — making privacy groups, rather than licensing terms, the battleground for consumer trust in paid downloads.
The trend: Music stores moving from lock-based DRM to DRM-free files are quietly replacing access controls with buyer-identifying watermarks, turning every purchase into a personal mark.