dday lets us know that he spotted an interesting article over at Slashdot.org. With a new technology, developed by Bandlink, it's possible that you're submitting personal information to a record company when playing audio CDs in your computer:
THE TECHNOLOGY - Our patent-pending, Bandlink CD Intelligence software makes the connection between artists and listeners by instantly launching an exclusive "Internet Powered" CD experience whenever a Bandlink encoded audio CD is inserted into a CD ROM Drive. |
INSTANT CD USAGE STATISTICS - Go online any time and check to see how many people are listening to your CD, what songs they are listening to, and how long they are listening. In addition, you can offer incentives for users to tell you who they are so you can collect demographic information and correlate it to their listening habits!
Now what about a user's privacy? Not everyone will appreciate that his CD-player/audio CD is sending out personal information to an unknown website, especially since there is hardly any information on the audio CDs itself about the Bandlink company using the CDs to gather information.
Source: Bandlink
