More Disturbing News on the Social Networking Front — Last.fm and the RIAA

According to TechCrunch, there are major shenanigans brewing at social networking/music site Last.fm.  Apparently RIAA lawyers are very upset about the leaked U2 album and decided to take shady actions to determine who downloaded it illegally.  What else is new, right?  But the shady action they took this time was to ask Last.fm to hand over their user’s Scrobbling data to see which of them was listening to tracks downloaded via Bitorrent.

Scrobbling is Last.fm’s way of keeping track of what users listen to in order to recommend tracks, albums or artists they might like.  Last.fm users can download software that Scrobbles/keeps track of every piece of music they listen to in all (or most) of their music and media players.  And now that data has (allegedly) been turned over to the RIAA.

See an update on this story (Last.fm and the RIAA deny TechCrunch’s assertion) after the jump.

Last.fm’s TOS is pretty clear that if you allow Scrobbling (which is voluntary — you don’t need it in order to use the service), data about what you listen to can be linked to your user name.  But, as Erick Schonfeld pointed out, “most probably never even considered it a possibility that individually identifiable information about their listening habits (legal, illegal, or otherwise) could be handed over to an organization known for taking consumers to court for file-sharing.”

If true, this move could be bad for Last.fm users and possibly for Last.fm itself.  Social networks are built on tenuous webs of trust between users and the service.  When the service breaks that trust, it disrupts the whole web.  It may even cause it to disintegrate.

Erick also points out that this shares a flavor with the recent Facebook TOS dustup.  It’s certainly a wakeup call for social network users and raises the question of how much you should put of yourself in the cloud.

Update: Last.fm responded via the TechCrunch article, on their forums, Twitterfeed, and their own blog stating that the news TechCrunch reported was a “vicious and completely false rumour”.

“When you signup to Last.fm and scrobble what you listen to, you are trusting us with your listening data. We take this very seriously. The old-timers on Last.fm who’ve been with us since the early days can attest to this – we’ve always been very open and transparent about how your data is used. This hasn’t changed. We never share personally identifiable data such as email and IP addresses. The only type of data we make available to labels and artists, other than what you see on the site, is aggregate data of listeners and number of plays.”

The blog post also points to an Ars Technica article where RIAA spokesperson Cara Duckworth says, “[We're] not sure where that rumor came from. It’s not true.”

Now we’d really love to know who TechCrunch’s source was!