RealNetworks took us for chumps while it spied on us

What are we thinking of when we trust someone far off on the Internet with our private lives?

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

RealNetworks took us for chumps while it spied on us

Nov. 7, 1999

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, The Syracuse Newspapers

   The Internet isn't a very private place. Web sites can track your activities unless you take steps to hide your tracks. Most of us don't.
   Most of us probably don't go to the trouble of turning off Web cookies and closing all the possible security gaps in our computers. We just enjoy the Internet and hope that the sites we visit are playing fair. We probably think sites run by respected companies are safe.
   Could we be any more wrong? Could we be any more naïve?
   I doubt it. I think we've reached bottom in the trust-your-friendly-company category. I've already written about Microsoft's policy of pretending Windows isn't full of security leaks -- until 14-year-olds with nothing better to do find gaping holes in Windows, that is -- and I've complained about the misuse of Web cookies for years.
   But I'd never lost my trust in one of the oldest and most respected companies in the Internet audio-and-TV business, RealNetworks. The people at RealNetworks did some dumb things for a while (making their software hard to remove, for example), but they listened to their critics and came up with outstanding software to play audio and video on the Internet. In fact, they set the current standard, and the radio show my partner Gene Wolf and I host each week is broadcast throughout the world using RealNetworks' techniques.
   The latest program from RealNetworks seemed to show how far the company had gone to create new and exciting products. It's the RealJukebox, an advanced (and very smart) CD player. It gives you an easy way to catalog your audio CDs by using the Internet's CD databases to provide title, track and artist information on each CD as soon as you slide it into your CD-ROM drive.
   Millions of home computer users downloaded and installed RealJukebox over the last few months.
   But I doubt that any of the 13 million users of RealJukebox had any idea that the program they got from RealNetworks was spying on them. We now know it was collecting information on what songs were stored on their hard drives, which format their programs used to store those songs, which kind of music they played the most and what kind of portable music player, if any, was attached to their computers.
   Whenever these users put a new CD in the drive, the software sent all this private information to RealNetworks, without so much as a simple window or dialog box asking if that was OK. RealNetworks never got permission for this flagrant violation of privacy and trust.
   A newspaper broke the story early in the week and RealNetworks admitted its program had been collecting all this data on the sly. "We made a mistake," said Rob Glaser, who runs RealNetworks. "We respect and value the privacy of our users and we deeply apologize for doing anything to suggest otherwise." Glaser said RealNetworks would stop the surreptitious data collection by offering users a software patch they can download from RealNetworks.
   You might wonder, as I do, which planet RealNetworks alighted from. If the company had valued the privacy of its users, Glaser wouldn't have been apologizing. What part of the phrase "You did a bad thing" does RealNetworks not understand?
   This is even clearer from another piece of information. RealNetworks was cataloging PC users and their preferences by using what's known as a GUID, a globally unique identifier. It works like the computer equivalent of your Social Security number. Not only was RealNetworks snooping on people who trusted it not to; it was snooping in a very personal way. It's one thing, I suppose, to rummage through private material you find at random, but a very different thing to tag everything you get with names and ID numbers.
   What was RealNetworks thinking of?
   The question is better asked of us. What are we thinking of when we trust someone far off on the Internet with our private lives and our personal preferences?
   I don't have any answers. But all of us need to work together to find a solution. If we don't, the next Rob Glaser to come along will find it for us.