![]() But less than a year later, Real was in hot water again for tracking the habits of its RealDownload download-management software customers. After a tsunami of bad publicity and a handful of lawsuits, Real issued a patch to prevent the software from tracking users’ listening habits. Turns out that RealPlayer G2, which had been out since the previous year, also broadcast unique IDs. Smith discovered that the software was assigning a unique ID to each user and phoning home with the titles of media files played on it–while failing to disclose any of this in its privacy policy. ![]() For example, shortly after RealJukeBox appeared in 1999, security researcher Richard M. RealPlayer also had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC–installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying “messages” that were really just advertisements, and so on.Īnd some of RealNetworks’ habits were even more troubling. A frustrating inability to play media files–due in part to constantly changing file formats–was only part of Real’s problem.
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