Are privacy and service a trade off?

There is a story going around the newswires that iTunes contains spyware that sends information about your music listening to Apple. (iTunes is the software interface to iPods.) Many articles are commenting that there is a trade-off: your personal information is not personal, but you get better music suggestions from Apple.

This does not have to be the case. First, the sending of your data could be optional. Second, you could have control over who the data is sent to and what data is sent.

There are two reasons why these things that could happen are not happening. They are about consumer helplessness. One reason is that Apple uses technical means to prevent iTunes users from being able to look at or modify the behaviour of the software (they distribute machine-readable binaries and withhold the human-readable source code). Another reason is that Apple uses legal means (copyright) to prohibit anyone that manages to fix the software from helping other computer users (which someone could otherwise do by distributing that fixed version).

The ubiquity of digital technologies and networks today poses questions about how to protect society's privacy. Over and over, free software is the best solution I see to many of these problems. People should have a right to study, modify, and redistribute the software that they use.