User Interface Engineering

The developers of Apple’s iTunes music system caused an uproar recently when it was discovered that one of the music player’s new features, the MiniStore, sends personal information back to the Music Store itself.

If you use iTunes and have upgraded since January 10th, you may have noticed the new feature yourself located at the bottom of your application. The MiniStore feature provides a small version of the Music Store that shows up when you’re browsing music from your own library. If you click on a Van Morrison ditty, the MiniStore feature (below: in light blue) will show links to the latest Van Morrison albums as well as recommendations from the iTunes Music Store.

Even with the amazing good-will that Apple seems to garner from its customers, this has upset many folks who worry that Apple is spying on their behavior without their consent. Boing Boinger Cory Doctorow, former member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group working to protect digital rights, had this to say:

“I love iTunes because it’s a clean music player. But no amount of clean UI is worth surrendering my privacy for — I wouldn’t buy a stereo that phoned home to Panasonic and told it what I was listening to; I wouldn’t buy a shower radio that delivered my tuning preferences to Blaupunkt. I certainly am not comfortable with Apple shoulder-surfing me while I listen to digital music, particularly if they’re doing so without my meaningful, informed consent and without disclosing what they intend on doing with that data.”

This situation is one in a growing trend that highlights what I’ll call the Paradox of Recommendations. The paradox is that in order to get better service in the form of personalized recommendations, we need to give up more information about ourselves in the process. So as we gain more help in deciding what products and services are right for us, we need to give up some of our privacy as well.

Interestingly, the iTunes case isn’t as much about giving up information as it is about coming clean concerning what the information is being used for. Doctorow explains:

“It’s easy enough to turn off the MiniStore (in the Mac version select “Hide MiniStore” from the Edit menu), and doing so deactivates the spyware behavior. The problem is that when you run the update, Apple effectively opts you in to a data-collection process without informing you that the process is taking place, nor obtaining your consent for it.”

Compare the iTunes bruhaha with another site that collects an amazing amount of personal information: Netflix. Netflix knows a lot about the people who rent movies from them. They know what your interests are, what your movie-watching habits are, your address, the names, interests, and addresses of your friends (who are also on Netflix), not to mention your payment information. The information gathered from iTunes pales in comparison to the nexus of identification that Netflix is gathering. And yet people freely give this information to Netflix in order to get better movie recommendations.

So what can designers creating recommendation systems learn from this? First, openness is key to gaining the trust of users. In the iTunes case, trust is as big an issue as personal information. Most folks were pleased to learn that simply shutting off the MiniStore feature stops the sending of personal information. However, many folks also understood that this feature could potentially lead them to good recommendations for music and weren’t bothered by it at all. Regardless of whether or not this is a concern to you, if Apple had openly notified users that this was going to happen, and given them the choice of whether or not to install the MiniStore, then this whole fiasco would have been prevented.

Second, Netflix proves that people are very willing to part with large amounts of personal information in order to get good recommendations in return. This should give designers hope of creating powerful systems for their users, based on their previous interactions with their service.

But any powerful service should also be tempered by the Paradox of Recommendations: that providing cool features is not just a matter of using personal information in clever ways. It’s also a matter of privacy, and as such, designers need to communicate that usage as clearly as they communicate any resulting benefits.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 6:00 am and is filed under Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.