The latest version of iTunes inlcudes a new feature called “MiniStore” which suggests albums and artists based on songs in your library. This means that iTunes has crawled your harddrive for files that match music types without your tacit approval (it is probably buried in the user license which I never read - who does?). In some circles, this is considered spyware. Do you really care?

We have all seen personalization from Amazon, Rhapsody Music Service and others based on information we have actively given them (bought a book, listened to Muddy Waters or Jett) and those services generate recommendations based on that. There are other services like Claria, Gator, 180Solutions that watch our behavior online, keep it in a database and display ads to us based on that - this is termed spyware.

Does iTunes fall into this category? I think so, especially if the information is not collected without an active notice and acceptance. If iTunes popped up an ad and said “hey, do you want recommendations based on ALL of your library - let us take look” and I said yes - then that’s fine. However, the current implementation is sketchy at best.