How to Find Your Personal Information Within Your iTunes Songs

By Daniel Miessler on January 18th, 2009: Tagged as Apple | Privacy

So you might have heard the news that there is some personal information in the “DRM-free” iTunes songs that Apple is now making available. I decided to see what strings (runs on Linux and OS X) could show me with a cursory glance:

[bash]strings $SongName | grep -i daniel[/bash]

Sure enough, it gave me this:

strings_itunes

So that’s:

  1. My iTunes account
  2. My full name

…in every song.

Not necessarily alarming but good to know. In short, even though these songs aren’t locked down like the previous ones, you should keep in mind that they can always be tracked back to you. ::

  • http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/People/person.php3?userid=mike Mike Blume

    You can find the same thing with Get Info in iTunes.

    Am I right in thinking that if that file were found on (say) my hard drive, that would be considered legal proof that you had broken the law?

  • http://slashback.org/ Zealot

    That's why I always re-encode my mp3s. With iTunes Store purchases (which I don't make that often), there's that extra step to have iTunes convert the .mp4s to .mp3s, but in my mind it's still worth it to get rid of any possible DRM or Tagging taint.

  • Xigxag

    Can we not locate and modify the binary for these strings? I'm envisioning a harassment type attack where you seed mass amounts of these iTunes files with the tracking information modified to match your target.

  • Xigxag

    Can we not locate and modify the binary for these strings? I'm envisioning a harassment type attack where you seed mass amounts of these iTunes files with the tracking information modified to match your target.


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