Jay-Z Is Watching, and He Knows Your Friends

I was checking the app out earlier and was curious to see what they're doing and what kind of data they're collecting, and they're really doing nothing out of the ordinary or worthy of distrust. They're using Flurry and Crittercism like everyone else, reverse geocoding your location with Google Maps API, and just serving up standard JSON data to power the app...again, just like every other app on your phone. One of the things I found interesting is that they're not using any kind of security model to protect the location of the media files online. If you clear the app data or start from a fresh download and trace the calls with a proxy like Charles or Fiddler, the entire album data is served up including full url's to the audio files on AWS. I don't know the etiquette around here, so I'll leave out the actual url and data, etc., but it's easiest enough to find for the crowd here.

I think it's brilliant. They're sending back events to the api when you stop and start tracks, and they're sending all of the information that the phone will give them - location, device/os info, storage/free space. This is probably the most real usage data a major artist has ever received on how, when and where their music is played by home listeners, and I wouldn't be surprised if this sets a major trend. They can pick which singles to release based on this data, decide where to spend the most money promoting concerts, etc.

Come on, its 2013, journalists can not seriously still mix up data collection by the government with privacy issues in our new connected world. The one side has 24/7 drones in the sky armed with lethal weapons and a satellite uplink to they-won't-say-who, the other has data people have given them at their own discretion.

This is an obvious attempt to lump two trending topics together, despite the fact that they're not really related.

Jay Z forces you to spam your friends to see his lyrics. The NSA logs your phone calls without your permission.

Big difference.

Wow. Quality journalistic piece right here only it's lacking the quality part. It would appear that Jon Pareles is attempting to make an issue out of nothing here even complaining that he was unable to get his free copy of the album until an hour after he was supposed too (as he laments in the last paragraph).

My favourite part of the article was this line in the second paragraph: "It’s an ugly piece of software." — I actually thought the app was pretty well-made. The animations and use of typography and media were balanced well.

Jay-Z isn't an Android developer, he didn't make the app, Samsung did. As the article points out he sold one million copies of the album to Samsung for promotional use at $5 a piece. It was Samsung that built the app and chose what permissions it required. To Jay-Z it was a simple transaction, all he had to do was supply the goods for a price and allow Samsung to do the lifting.

Oh and there is a difference between a Government secretly collecting and recording your information without your permission and an app giving you the option of sharing your data. You don't just install the app and it automatically allows and helps itself to the contents of your phone. Jon is going to have a heart-attack when he realises a lot of other apps in the Play Store demand similar permissions as well.

Sensationalism at its finest here.

"Yet now, it’s Jay-Z who’s lurking — in my phone." Honestly the worst piece of journalism I've read in quite some time.

Terrible article. Jay-Z himself had nothing to do with the actual application. Somehow he and Samsung got together and decided to market his album through a free to download app (Smart move in my opinion). Samsung developed the app and it was in their best interest to make sure that it worked properly upon the midnight release (it didn't).

It would be Samsung who's "watching", but then again I'm not quite sure why this article links surveillance to spamming in the first place.

Typical media sensationalism.

A better foil to what Jay-Z is doing is Daft Punk: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-27/daft-punks-g...

Jay-Z's marketing campaign is aggressive (pushing users to post things on social networks to unlock things) while Daft Punk is taking a more hands off approach, letting their fans spread the word.

It will be interesting to see which one sells more.

Jay-Z is a media star and therefore, he's going to say whatever is necessary to keep his fans around, until he doesn't want to be a media star anymore. However, he's also going to do what he needs to make money and if it's at odds with what he says, well, most of his fans won't even notice.

It's not that they're stupid, nor is he. He wants to make money and stay in the spotlight, his fans want music and fun, not a lot of deep political thought for which they don't even have the background.

Samsung doesn't need all of this data because it already has it. Looks like Jay-Z's people pushed this as a term in the giveaway to get more value out of the deal. i.e. marketing to 1 million fans.

That said, there's nothing really nefarious here. Users accept a standard dialogue to access the app that exchanges their data and contact info for music. Making someone tweet for lyrics is kind of lame but it's still the user's choice to do so.

Maybe not Jay-Z's artistic statement, but I think it's an interesting artistic idea for a performer to make his fans choose between their privacy and their hunger for entertainment, in order to make a statement about the problem with our privacy being that we're too willing to trade it away. If that was his intention, I say "bravo."

This is just bad product experience. They're gonna have a nightmare marketing it the next time around.

Jay takes a 50% price cut for user information. If users are happy to pass that along for free music 5 days before anyone else then that is the cost.

Most people aren't concerned by this, theyre used to it now. Not saying it's right but its what is so.

It's been known for some time that Jay-Z has precisely 99 problems.

However, so far, it appears to be unclear whether you, as a user, are among them.