Apparently we missed something, here-- when did Microsoft buy RealNetworks? It must have been during that week we spent with our eyes glued to the "Before They Were Rock Stars" marathon or something, because we have no recollection of this happening whatsoever. But acquisitions are a common item on Bill Gates' to-do list (heck, sometimes he buys three companies before breakfast) and we figure that the RealNetworks purchase just slipped right past us. How else could anyone explain the news that RealNetworks has been secretly tracking private customer data?

Yes, as faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil notes via a Reuters article in MacWEEK, if you use RealJukebok, then RealNetworks knows what you're listening to. In fact, they know how many songs you downloaded and kept on your hard disk, what file formats those songs are in, whether you prefer Country and Western to Death Metal, and even what kind of portable MP3 player you've got, if you're lucky enough to own one. And they're tracking all that data by attaching it to a GUID-- a globally unique identifier. If that term sounds familiar, it may be because a GUID was secretly embedded in every document created with latter-day versions of Microsoft Office. It's old hat from the folks in Redmond.

Oh, wait-- our mistake. Apparently RealNetworks is not owned by Microsoft. (Yet.) In a followup New York Times article, RealNetworks admits that the secret collection of music data from customers is a violation of the company's own posted privacy policy. They've posted a patch that will make RealJukebox stop submitting private data, and they've even launched an "immediate review of RealNetworks' privacy practices" complete with "outside privacy experts to verify that [the company's] practices are consistent with its policies." That doesn't sound like a Microsoft-owned company to us; the standard Redmond response would likely have been stony silence to be interpreted as a big, fat "so what?" Anyway, it's all just one more reason to use QuickTime instead. Unless Steve's watching, too...