That's the trouble with print: sometimes life overtakes it. Between us washing the ink off our hands and breaking the forme to get Thursday's Technology section over to the printers, and it appearing, Apple moved over criticism that iTunes 6.0.2 acts like spyware. (That's the link to our story.)
John Gruber at Daring Fireball explains that Apple has now updated what gets displayed in the MiniStore, so that it's clear you can opt out of it, and also that you have to opt in to the MiniStore display. (Gruber's got a nice bit-of-a-screenshot of it.)
Though Gruber thinks it was always "pretty obvious" that iTunes had to be sending data back to Apple's servers (though he doesn't mention that it goes via a third party, called Omniture, on the way) for the MiniStore to be able to show songs related to what you're playing, I think that doesn't stop it being spyware in the strict definition. After all, if you start applying different definitions depending on whether the company involved has a zillion eager fans, or a zillion hate-filled enemies, then it's not much of a definition, is it?
A search on "spyware definition" brings up many which mention "hidden components", and transmission of data without the user's knowledge or explicit agreement, and lack of opt-in. Arguably, what's changed to put iTunes outside the definition is the third of these.
Still, a nice observation at 2mlc: "I also wonder why Cory [Doctorow, who kicked the whole thing off] is worried about Apple knowing what he listens to when he makes it public for the entire world anyway." Um, yes..
