http://uits.umusic.com/faq.htm This stuff is a bit scary actually - This technology allows an encrypted metadata field to be put in any music bought online to detect "tampering", different sales/transactions, etc. This means that in theory this could easily associate your credit card # with your music purchases, and allow them to automatically delete music you bought. If you copied a purchased un-DRM'd song to a different device (i.e. from PC to smartphone) - this flag would change and phone-home to the record label.
How I read your thread title: OMG WE IZ BEINGZ WaTCHED BY Da FBIZZZZ!!!11!!!111!!ONEHUNDREDELEVEN!!! DIS IS SOOOOOOOOO GaY.... How much of your thread I actually read: None.
"Can UITS track my playback activity? No. UITS is just extra metadata in a media file" Doesn't this one line kill your theory stone dead??
watermarking has been used for ages on promo copies, to ensure that no journalist leaks the material before the release date.
What I don't understand is that these people bleeting on about privacy and how their activities are being tracked are the exact same people who; check in everywhere on facebook, foursquare, getglue, last.fm etc. Not only that they'll probably have loyalty cards for tesco, nectar, boots, etc and will expect rewards for doing so. And yes these people will likely argue that they consented to it, but the likelyhood is they consented (by just clicking or ticking 'I accept the terms and conditions' without reading). If you don't want to be tracked doing anything, find a nice cave and die in it. Problem solved.
Thread closure imminent! Inb4lock? Ithinkso. On an on-topic note though, I am totally with Lorquis on this... The whole "my entire life on Facebook, Twitter and *insert popular Internet Social Media network names here*" thing is way out of control for a scary number of people. It's gotten to the point where potential employers are looking up your social media profile to see what sort of life you have out of that suit and tie you were just interviewed in. That's beyond too far, that's privacy out the window on a level that can only be described as out of bounds. They bring it on themselves though. If you're going to tell the Internet about every move you make in your day to day life, something bad is bound to come of it eventually. My facebook profile is there as a means of communicating with my close friends and relatives who live in other countries. I update my status at the most twice a week, if I have something interesting to say or share, and it's usually a lot less than that. As for all my music being tracked? Good luck with that. I have a 700GB iTunes music library, and another 500GB of video for Apple TV. Do your worst, UITS.
So we're talking about a plain text tag, that is viewable in id3? I've seen these. They are usually in the 'comments' tag or one of the extended fields, and you can delete them in mp3tag. Who cares? I agree wholly with the comments on social media, and is why I have nothing to do with it. Essentially anonymous posts like this in forums are as far as I go. There are some real nice caves if you can afford them... look up Andalucia Spain cave homes.
This year a couple of the majors may release their catalogues in higher quality without any DRM at all. That's no guarantee but it's a possibility. We could be close to common sense prevailing after all. Not sure if this is relevant to the OP's thread, I CBA to read it.
I find it funny that some of the very people in this thread are ones who have been making comments to the effect of "The community standard on the forums has fallen lately " and then they act like dicks here because they see an easy target to poke fun at in a thread in SD. Maybe you agree with the OP, maybe you disagree. Do you have to act like children about it? Seriously guys, cop the **** on and practice what you preach. Thread responses like these are exactly why the tone and sense of community on these forums plummeted in the past couple of years. Pathetic.
Did you see the original, unedited thread title? You can't expect a thread title with more z's in it than vowels to be taken seriously dude. Seriously. Anyway, we're back on topic now, a mod edited the thread title to something more sensible and appropriate for the SD forum and we're over it. Well, I am anyway.
All your music are belong to us? Well sure. You own the right to play it, not the music itself. For those few who cannot work out the difference: when were you last paid any royalties? That's what owning the music means.
A candidate my sister interviewed put a link to his blog on his CV. After the interviews they were reviewing the candidates and decided to look at his blog as the job entailed writing reports for political parties and press releases so the standard of their writing was crucial. The blog was a running tirade of abuse about all his failed job interviews including the latest post which had some quite offensive comments about the interview panel he had just been infront of. When he was informed he had not got the job he asked for feedback why. The response? We read your blog.