Apple iTunes: Ping privacy

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September 2nd, 2010 - Posted by Kent

It's "Facebook meets Twitter meets iTunes," that's how Steve Jobs explained Ping, Apple's new social networking addition to iTunes. When Jobs announced Ping yesterday, he made a big point about how easy the privacy is to manage. Having covered Facebook privacy on this blog before, we were curious to see how Apple's Ping would avoid Facebook's pitfalls.

First, what is Ping? Ping is really a way for iTunes store customers to share their musical tastes with others as well as follow the activities of their favorite musicians (assuming their favorites are participating). If you join Ping your iTunes activity is displayed in your feed. People who follow you can, in Facebook fashion, view, like or comment on your purchases. Here's what a Ping profile looks like:

iTunes Ping Profile Page

As you can see, there's not much information revealed here. This is my Ping page, which I'm totally comfortable sharing here because it displays virtually nothing about me (my Facebook page, on the other hand has much more data, so it's private). I chose the music displayed in the upper right. My activity is displayed at the bottom. By the way, I "liked" Lady Gaga for demonstration purposes only. Only music is shown in your purchase feed. Podcast downloads and audiobooks do not show up, so rest assured that the self-help audio book you bought on bed-wetting will not show up along side your recent music purchases.

Ping will tell you when artists that you're following are touring near you, and there are Ticketmaster links so you can buy tickets. There's also a page where you can choose to say that you're going, creating a notification in your feed. If you want to keep this and the rest of your activity feed private, you'll want to edit your privacy settings. While you have to set these up while signing up, you can edit them at any time through your account settings (click on your email address in the upper right hand corner and enter your password when prompted).

iTunes Ping Privacy Page

These are the actual privacy settings, and they're not very deep. Essentially you're just choosing if other users can find you and view your activity and full profile, essentially whether or not you want to approve new followers. Choosing the "Don't Allow" option makes you fairly invisible, unless you review content on iTunes. If you do, your name and photo will show up by your review. Theses options are pretty all-or-nothing, which is the price you pay for simplicity.

So, while Jobs has made it very simple to control your visibility, you're not at risk of exposing very much. We can't even warn you not to broadcast your vacation plans because, well, you can't create status updates. So that's Ping privacy in a nut shell. Of course, you don't have to join Ping. By default, it's turned off.

Or is it? So far we've dealt with information viewable by users, but if you're an iTunes customer, know that Apple sees all your information, and will share it with partners for marketing reasons. There's no way to opt out of this, and it's probably not really that different from what other companies do.