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Everyone wanted DRM-free music and EMI partnered with Apple to make it happen.

Now apparently it’s not being done right. Of course, we all knew that the account holder name and associated e-mail address was being stored in the DRM encrypted tracks. But somehow everyone seems to think that Apple was going to just cease to embed that because the song was DRM-free.

Ars Technica has a story up on this.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some data was being analyzed in aggregate, although Apple’s current privacy policy does not appear to allow for this. As with the dust-up over the mini-store, Apple should clarify what this embedded data is used for.

Give me a break. Sure, if the privacy policy states that Apple isn’t going to use the data for purchase analyization, then fine. But I would be willing to bet that the author of the story has at least one of those grocery store cards, or a gas station card, or even a driver’s license, that contains some sort of barcode or mag stripe on it. What exactly do you think the stores do with all that data on your purchasing habits? They analyze it for trends of course.

Chicken Little, the sky is not falling.