Topic: Amazon Prime Music... a possible privacy concern?

[PyroMenace]

Alright so Prime music launched a couple days ago and I just found out about it this morning via their email. It's something they are launching to compete with services like Spotify and Rdio. Now I have bought a handful of albums from Amazon before, and they had a music manager/cloud client that you can use to keep track of your library and such, much like itunes. I rarely used it, just to download shit to my hard drive whenever I made a purchase. Anyway to the point, a couple days ago I noticed an icon from my desktop disappear, it was empty spot among the handful of icons I have there, I honestly couldn't figure out or remember what it was. But as of this Prime Music announcement... now I know. It was the Amazon cloud player, it's gone, it was ninja deleted off my computer with my permission or knowledge, no notification, nothing. Before I got an update notification when I launched it.

Now I know we have a lot of automatic update features on nearly everything these days, not to mention all the various monitoring on web browsing I'm sure every browser has, but this kinda bothered me. I would have preferred some sort of notification on a OS start up or when I launched the client, this made me feel a little bit too exposed.

[Cobra951]

I don't trust anything to go autoupdate itself.  I always disable that when possible, and I don't allow anything access to the internet unless it needs to go there to function (e.g., browser).  So even if some app's autoupdate is not defeatable, it can't get anywhere when it tries.  Of course, your cloud player would need such access, and what happened to you is one reason I never use such a thing.  When I had a working iPod, I tried out iTunes, and damn if it didn't aggravate me to no end with its entitlement over my system.

Having said that, does this help?

[scottws]

This is the first time I've heard of such a thing happening on a PC, but it's been going on in the mobile space for quite awhile now.  Unfortunately, modern society has for the most part completely given up its consumer rights for the sake of convenience and immediate gratification. 

[Quemaqua]

What scott said.

[Cobra951]

Yes indeed.  Surrendering not only control but even the actual possession of your digital stuff can only end in tears.  I'm quite wary of all this cloud stuff, and will only ever use it for backup and for remote access.  Well, that and email.  Email as a service makes perfect sense, as long as any attachments get properly downloaded.