• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 13, 2006

Apple Computer this week miscalculated the degree of suspicion that consumers now harbor towards anything remotely resembling spyware online.

The latest version of iTunes, released this week, has a feature, "MiniStore," that suggests other albums and tracks to users, based on songs in users' libraries.

Even though the feature doesn't seem that unusual--Amazon, for one, has long recommended books to users based on their prior shopping history--Apple immediately found itself on the defensive.

After bloggers discovered the MiniStore, they immediately began posting complaints, accusing Apple of installing "spyware" and violating users' privacy. By Friday, stories about the dust-up appeared in mainstream news organizations like PCMag.com and the Los Angeles Times.

An Apple spokesman eventually told the media that the company didn't keep any information used to issue recommendations. Apple's Web site also contains instructions about how to disable the MiniStore.

The complaints likely will blow over as soon as users learn how to turn off the feature. Meantime, the outrage--at least in the blogosphere--should serve as a warning to all companies that intend to target ads based on users' history.

Consumers' instinctive reaction is that such ads violate their privacy; this response might be a knee-jerk one, but it's real. And marketers only make it worse by serving personalized ads without fully disclosing their methods. Rather than leaving users to stumble across instructions for disabling MiniStore, Apple--and any other marketers that personally target ads--should in the future make sure that consumers know well in advance how ad-serving programs will collect data, and how to stop them from doing so.