Apple Music and information sharing: a case study?

So my wife (a Windows user) went so see a popular movie a couple of days ago. She subsequently searched the internet for schwag relating to the movie and ended up putting a few items related to that movie on her Amazon wishlist.

Also, seemingly unrelatedly, she is planning a business trip to China, so she has been frequenting a lot of official Chinese sites (for visa information and the like).

Today among my Apple Music suggestions is the soundtrack to the aforementioned movie, but in Chinese. Which is unusual; being an English-speaker, I’ve never gotten a non-English recommendation, and I rarely listen to movie soundtracks. This would be a totally random suggestion for me—but it would be entirely plausible for my wife if the suggestion were derived from her internet footprint.

I (a Mac user) personally keep as tight a lid as I can on my browsing info (cookie manager, do-not-track enabled, Ghostery, etc) but she does not. Is it plausible that some wholesale internet marketing infosucker could:

1: infer that we are married or related
2: understand that she is interested in that popular movie and also in Chinese-related matters
3: identify me therefore as someone else who could potentially be interested in those same things
4: sell that information to Apple who could potentially use it in its recommendations algorithm.

Frankly, numbers 1-3 seem quite plausible to me. Number 4, though . . . I have always tended to give Apple the benefit of the doubt when they claim to take privacy seriously. But their privacy policy seems to center largely on promising to not benefit from their users’ information; there’s not much there about what they might do with information provided to them by third parties.

What are the odds that this just a coincidence?

I agree 1-3 are pretty much a given. Someone has a database that shows that you and your wife live at the same address and your phones are near each other regularly and you have the same last name (if you do) and so on.

I don’t know about 4, but my impression is that Apple’s interest in privacy is in not sharing data that they have access to. They won’t sell (or in many cases even collect) data on their users. I don’t know if that would extend to not using data from other firms in marketing, but I would guess that unless it’s explicit, it would not.

So the violins and cellos and other instruments were all playing in Mandarin? Seriously, what’s the soundtrack?

Ostensibly, Apple creates music recommendations only from the music you listen to and what you’ve told it you like/dislike. So my vote is for coincidence.

But if Apple Music’s 60 million subscribers suddenly started getting music recommendations based on their spouses web browsing history, well, that would just be fucking hilarious.

The text on the image of the front cover was in Chinese.

It will be trivial for many data gatherers to know you are related. Traffic from the same IP address is going to be enough. Even using Ghostery and NoScript your ID is trivially tracked with browser fingerprinting - and ironically using tools like Ghostery makes your fingerprint more unique and easier to target you with. So not just the usual suspects (Google) know you both, but many other tracking systems.

If both of you visit sites that use the same underlying tracking systems you will be tied. So, would say Amazon tie her purchases to you? Yes, trivially. Google of course will see the lot via both site tracing tools and search history.

The only weak link is why Apple would actually pay for this data. they could, but building a case that it would be of enough benefit to them to shell out real money for the data is a stretch. Especially for a product (some music) that they most likely won’t make money off the back of above your monthly subscription. Apple have an uneasy relationship with Google.

If there i any other reason why Apple would promote the album (composer, genre, whatever) it is perhaps more plausible. But I agree, it remains odd. I have my system bolted down pretty tight, and I have never had any odd music recommendations relating to my other on-line activities pop up.