Recent research suggests that the newest version of Microsoft’s Media Player logs information about its users’ playing habits and transmits the data to the company’s headquarters.
Security expert Richard M. Smith documented this tracking routine. Previously, he had discovered that early versions of Windows Media Player could send out unique digital identification markers over the Internet. Further investigations revealed that the latest edition, version 8, sends an analogous marker to Microsoft’s website whenever a given user tries to read DVD chapter information on the person’s computer. Microsoft then provides information on the particular DVD chapter and notes this in a log file stored on the user’s machine. The corresponding Microsoft privacy policy does not mention this specific practice, although it does allude to a similar scheme regarding compact discs.
It is unclear whether this collection of data is illegal. Smith pointed out that the “Video Privacy Protection Act of the United States prevents video rental stores from using movie titles for direct marketing purposes. The letter of this law does not apply to Microsoft because they are not a video rental store. However, clearly the spirit of the law is that companies should not be using movie title information for marketing purposes.” A Microsoft spokesperson has since claimed: “No personally identifying information is ever transferred to Microsoft as a result of DVD playback, and any information that is transferred cannot be combined with any other sources of information to identify users.”
See Steven Bonisteel, “Privacy Watchdog Says Windows XP Software Logs DVD
Play,” Newsbytes, February 21, 2002 at
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174673.html
See also D. Ian Hopper, “Windows spies on musical taste,” Associated Press,
February 21, 2002 at