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The specific claim, page 3 of the pdf > Apple sells, rents, transmits, and/or otherwise discloses, to various third parties, information reflecting the music t
by x0x0 7y ago
The specific claim, page 3 of the pdf
> Apple sells, rents, transmits, and/or otherwise discloses, to various third parties, information reflecting the music that its customers purchase from the iTunes Store application that comes pre-installed on their iPhones. The data Apple discloses includes the full names and home addresses of its customers, together with the genres and, in some cases, the specific titles of the digitally-recorded music that its customers have purchased via the iTunes Store and then stored in their devices' Apple Music libraries (collectively "Personal Listening Information").
It goes on to say that after Apple discloses, 3rd parties append personal info -- gender, age, HHI, etc -- and resell.
Later, they basically show the dataset available for $80/M, or $1.5m/full.
As for the api, it seems to want a requestUserToken
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skcloudservicecontroller/2909079-requestusertoken https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skcloudse...
which seems to be only available to code running on iOS or tvOS.
Unless I'm being dumb, my guess is some advertising middlewares started grabbing these user tokens, scraping data, and reselling. It doesn't seem obvious how you would get a token to get a specific user's data without running on that user's ios or tvos device.
Also, one of the vendors, CDW, says their population is 18,188,721 (presumably unique users?). There has to be way more ios users who've purchased songs than 18m.
- scarface74 7y agoI don’t get it either. If that’s the API in question, the user has to give the iOS app permission to access the user’s playlist and it still doesn’t give demographic data. Also, the story is devoid of any technical information about like most NYT’s articles discussing an Apple controversy.