Some people are considering iTunes to be malware for the MiniStore feature of iTunes 6.0.2. They say that it is a violation of privacy that iTunes is sending information about your music to external servers. This happens even if you are not explicitly in the iTunes Music Store.
There doesn't appear to be any personal information, other than the currently selected tracks, sent to the servers. I can think that there should be an option that the user could set to disable this feature. I personally, will leave this feature enabled. In fact, I want the recommendations to show for the currently playing track, and not just the currently selected track.
At least on my machine, iTunes is connecting to the following address for getting the recommendation information
69.45.64.102
69.45.64.104
69.45.64.105
192.168.112.2o7.net
The one concern that I do have is that the ip addresses in the range of 69.45.64.102-105 are not allocated to Apple. The ip address range is owned by "Williams Communications, Incorporated". According to the whois information, they are located in Oklahoma.
The other host resolves to 216.52.17.117. It looks like the 2o7.net domain was registered by Omniture, Inc, in Utah.
After doing this research, I will be disabling the MiniStore, as I don't know who is running these servers.
[via The Apple Blog]
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