How does Google Scrape library data from Itunes?
Hello! So something interesting I noticed a couple of months ago and I've been thinking about it ever since. Google seems to have figured out some way to scrape the data from an iTunes music library on the same device from one of their apps. I'm not sure which one. And it's not through information sharing and it's not through consensual data sharing with Google. I basically have a specific set of music, mostly stuff that years ago I copied into my iTunes music library. It's now part of my Apple music library. It's never left the app. I don't search for these artists or particular songs on YouTube. It's some pretty unrelated niche stuff that's part of my music library that has suddenly maybe it was November, December, maybe a little bit before that. Suddenly it started to mysteriously appear in YouTube basically notifications, recommendations, out of nowhere. Hey, you don't listen to music on YouTube. Why don't you listen to YouTube music? We already have all of your music from your music library. You could just switch right now and start listening. I thought it was very interesting because this is for me, siloed in iTunes, Apple music. I'm not aware of how you access it without some sort of OAuth mechanism. There is a mechanism inside iOS when you're developing an app. You can add a sign in with Apple music button and then the data you can access the data at that point through a third party app. But it seems that Google has somehow figured out how to strip the shiisley, scrape all of that data, song names, artist names from the entire iTunes music library. I'm guessing through one of the apps that I've installed from Google on a device and that data has made it over to Google specifically so they can basically promote YouTube music. We're just a competitor app, which is why I think, you know , wouldn't Apple got great links to prevent a competitor app from scraping this data and making off with it. Presumably, you know, the only thing that can do with it is basically advertise to you inside of Google apps to try to get you to migrate from Apple music to YouTube music. I just thought it was very interesting. It seems like something that Apple would go to great links to prevent Google from doing yet. They've obviously figured out a way to do it. Before you get down to this route, I've thought about this a while. This isn't like people who Google something and then they're surprised that they see an ad somewhere else on the internet and they don't understand how like double click works and they think that their phone is listening to them. Like, okay, I laugh at these people all day. I know that's not a thing that your phone is not like spying on you to. I know this has the same kind of sound as those stories. It has the same kind of feel, but I. For months of thought about this, I cannot think of a way that Google could have access and information except through having an app installed on the same device. I don't know, maybe it's easier on Mac OS, like maybe they used the Google Chrome binary to read my iTunes music library. That'd be even crazier, right? What I'm saying is like whatever method they employed to get this data probably is interesting and there's probably some people at Apple sending angry emails to Google developers about not being adhered. Being adherent to developer terms or something. I don't know. I think it's interesting. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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