The headline here "Apple sells iTunes' purchase histories to highest bidders" makes it sound like it's a fact. According to the article, these are the allegations in a lawsuit.
That this data ended up with aggregators doesn't seem too surprising but I'd be genuinely shocked if the source was Apple selling it vs some kind of 3rd party analytics leakage + correlation with other data sources for demographic data. I can't see any evidence of Apple selling it in the complaint.
This is so dumb if it's true. We're witnessing a huge shift towards a privacy-conscious climate and a major competitive advantage for Apple is that they ostensibly respect it; to act against that interest is inviting trouble.
What’s the proof they have of that? The article doesn’t seem to mention it.
There’s a link to the actual lawsuit in the article. The proof they claim is that 1) a company sells iTunes and Pandora listening data, and 2) 3rd party apps use Apple’s API’s, and they can use it for anything. So, for 1), where is that company actually getting iTunes data from, and for 2) seriously? By that logic, Microsoft can be used for providing programmers access to your file system.