Jazz Odyssey

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MSNBC ran this article by Bob Sullivan this past Friday. Mr. Sullivan presents some information on Gracenote (formerly CDDB), the "quiet company" that populates the track list and album data in iTunes when you place a CD in your computer. Gracenote began life years ago as a volunteer project, with thousands of users keypunching CD information into its database. Now in its commercialized life, Gracenote provides CD data to hundreds of software programs and publishes a Digital Top 20 chart for Billboard. iTunes is but one of dozens of pieces of software that access the Gracenote database.

The tone of the article raises some privacy concerns about exactly what Gracenote does with all the data they are collecting such as your IP address, which is submitted to Gracenote everytime you put a CD into iTunes and it looks up the data in the Gracenote database. I’m a little unclear as to exactly what the privacy worry would be. All Gracenote can tell is if a particular CD was put into my computer. Perhaps they know what application I was using as well, and the date/time I put the disc in. But that’s it. They don’t know if I’ve even played the disc. They don’t know if it’s mine or if I borrowed it. They don’t know if its a factory pressed disc or a CD-R. They don’t know if I’ve ripped it. The bottom line is that hey have NO idea what my listening habits are–they only know what CDs I’ve put into my CD-ROM drive.

All-in-all, Gracenote saves me a lot of typing, and I’m not very concerned about privacy issues with this data….after all, what’s going to happen? Gracenote is going to sell some marketing company the fact that I listened to Tales from Topographic Oceans on Friday night? While that may be grounds for being excommunicated from the music industry, it certainly isn’t putting anyone a step closer to hacking my bank account.  I’m certain that there are more pressing and legitimate privacy issues on the net worthy of Mr. Sullivan’s and MSNBC’s bandwidth.

Of course, if you have an issue with Gracenote, you can always switch to any number of applications that use the freedb database, which is an open source alternative to Gracenote.  iTunes isn’t the only audio player/library manager out there…