Apple release removal tool for unwanted U2 album

By Dot Matrix
in Apple (macOS)

 Share

Recommended Posts

Grand Master

Dot Matrix

Posted
Posted

.... Yes, you read that right. Removing the album requires a removal tool. After numerous complaints, Apple has set up a special knowledge base article detailing the steps needed to remove the album here. But be warned, if you would like to acquire the album again, you'll need to re-download it through iTunes. It'll remain free up until October 13th.

 

 

Via The Verge

Grand Master

bandit_liberty_rumble

Posted
Posted

.... Yes, you read that right. Removing the album requires a removal tool.  

... You were able to get rid of it even before. It worked like any other iTunes purchase. Now this will remove it from your purchase history as well (where it could only be hidden before)

Proficient

vhane

Posted
Posted

People will bitch about anything when it comes to Apple. Even when gifted stuff.

 

A copy of Transformers Dark Side of the Moon appeared in my Google Play account when I purchased a Nexus 7. Did I want it? No. Did I feel the need to bitch about it online? No.

Community Regular

daorbed9

Posted
Posted

People will bitch about anything when it comes to Apple. Even when gifted stuff.

 

A copy of Transformers Dark Side of the Moon appeared in my Google Play account when I purchased a Nexus 7. Did I want it? No. Did I feel the need to bitch about it online? No.

 

Was it automatically downloaded to your phone taking up space you may not want to spare?  I don't own one but what they did was wrong.

Grand Master

bandit_liberty_rumble

Posted
Posted

Was it automatically downloaded to your phone taking up space you may not want to spare?   

 

that depends entirely on whether he had his devices set up to automatically download new purchases.

 

Apple's approach of automatically distributing this album in the same way that an actual purchase would was a bit heavy-handed. But people have also been making a mountain out of this molehill...

Experienced

lt8480

Posted
Posted

I think its the inconvenience of having to remove it is the issue that everyone has... not the fact it was available for free. After all for many users it automatically downloads it to all devices they own. Using storage and bandwidth.

 

What stops this happening again tomorrow, and the day after - allowing apple to push content onto devices without say so is pretty much advertising and if this became an accepted norm in no time we be having to deleted "free content" every day.

 

Would it have really been that difficult to send users a text, or an email or a notification saying "click here to grab it for free now" - of course not but that would have meant most people wouldn't have bothered to download it.

Experienced

benthebear

Posted
Posted

Removal tool? Please. It's the equivalent of a dialog box that pops up saying, "Are you sure you want to remove this file? If you click yes, you can't get it back if you do!"

Community Regular

daorbed9

Posted
Posted

that depends entirely on whether he had his devices set up to automatically download new purchases.

 

Apple's approach of automatically distributing this album in the same way that an actual purchase would was a bit heavy-handed. But people have also been making a mountain out of this molehill...

 

Who wants to manually push everything to their phone?  I'd wager 80% or more do not.  So they took advantage of a situation they created to have a marketing opportunity.  It's the principle of the idea.  People don't want their private phones invaded.  Even though we have no real privacy the general public wants to believe we do.

Grand Master

bandit_liberty_rumble

Posted
Posted

It's the principle of the idea.  People don't want their private phones invaded.  Even though we have no real privacy the general public wants to believe we do.

I'm sorry, it's fine to compare this to spam if you want to (even though I might disagree), but to call it an invasion of privacy is a little far-fetched. At that point I find it hard to take the discussion seriously anymore. Nobody's phone was "invaded". People were  gifted an item that they might not have wanted, that's all.

Grand Master

Shadrack

Posted
Posted

I'm sorry, it's fine to compare this to spam if you want to (even though I might disagree), but to call it an invasion of privacy is a little far-fetched. At that point I find it hard to take the discussion seriously anymore. Nobody's phone was "invaded". People were  gifted an item that they might not have wanted, that's all.

 

This.

 

They maybe didn't execute the delivery of the gift very well. An email or something with instructions on how to claim your free U2 album (if you wanted it) probably would have been better received. But the rhetoric of this is getting a little ridiculous.

Grand Master

Stoffel

Posted
Posted

Not a big Apple fan myself, but I agree this is blown out of proportion.

Could they have had a better delivery system, with an email like some are suggesting, yes, but it doesn't deserve all the bitching

Grand Master

devHead

Posted
Posted

Hilarious.  give people the option to DL it themselves...dont force it on others.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't grasp too well the idea of choice.  Heck, they have decided for you that you don't need an SD card in your iPhone or iPad, nor do you need a USB slot on an iPad.  Since they know better than their customers, why would they give them a choice?

Removal tool? Please. It's the equivalent of a dialog box that pops up saying, "Are you sure you want to remove this file? If you click yes, you can't get it back if you do!"

That might be a little much for some people who have Apple devices.

Proficient

vhane

Posted
Posted

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't grasp too well the idea of choice.  Heck, they have decided for you that you don't need an SD card in your iPhone or iPad, nor do you need a USB slot on an iPad.  Since they know better than their customers, why would they give them a choice?

That might be a little much for some people who have Apple devices.

 

Okay, let's look at that SD card example.

 

What are we trying to solve here, what's the actual crux of the matter? Well, people have different storage needs. Some need less and don't want to pay for more storage than they require, and some need a lot of storage. Solution? We'll sell phones with different amounts of storage.

 

As a designer or engineer, do you ask whether we should support SD cards? Or do you ask why people use SD cards? Indeed, why? To add storage? Well give them enough built-in storage so that they don't have to go out and buy an SD card. The alternative is to ship, and hence charge people for, reader hardware that not everybody might use, and which takes up volume on the device. And once you ship with this reader, you create a dependency on that reader for future generations of the device. Think really hard before adding this kind of dependency. Once added, you can't easily take it away from people who have come to depend on it.

 

What's the other use of an SD card - to transfer files? Give them email, messaging, and allow third party apps so that Dropbox etc. can offer solutions. Why not an SD card? Well, the receiving device needs to have a reader too. Plus if the receiving device needs to be able to read the files that means that we can't encrypt the storage layer! Do you want people to be able to pick your phone up, take the SD card out and simply copy your files?

 

SD cards aren't an end unto themselves. Solve problems instead of thinking in terms of features. Remember where SD cards come from. They were originally created to store photos on cameras back in the days when storage was counted in megabytes and you needed to carry multiple cards to cater for one photo shoot. Why add mechanical, electronic and software complexity to a device if you're simply going to stick an SD card in and leave it there all the time? Ship with enough built-in storage. Solve the real problem. SD cards were also meant to transfer photos back to the photographer's computer back when cameras couldn't simply stream photos out in real time as you took them. What Does a Horse?s Ass have to do with The Space Shuttle?

 

People put "choice" on a pedestal like it's a binary. It's not "choice" vs. "no choice". It's a continuum on a scale. But how opinionated should a solution be? It's better for a design to take a stance. You know for a fact that you won't be able to please everybody, so don't try to do that at the expense of adding complexity to your solution, hence making it less convenient and less effective. Some people will not use your product as a result, but hey, there are other products that will please them. A great solution elicits the reaction - Well of course it works this way. How else would it? Conversely, you may also have a strong adverse reaction from some people. But that's inevitable. Better to solve the problem really well for some people than to offer a middling solution for most people. Anyone who's ever designed anything will know that customisation can be a cop out. "I can't solve this problem, we'll let the people decide". If you're having to add tons of settings to cater for edge cases, then maybe it's time to rethink the problem. As a programmer, when that happens, I know that I need to raise the abstraction level, take a step back and look at the problem again from a higher vantage point. It's a sign that I'm solving the wrong problem.

 

So know when choice is important, and what form it takes. Maybe it doesn't take the form of an SD card. Maybe it takes the form of different amounts of built-in storage. Granted, sometimes customisability for the sake of personalisation trumps almost everything else. Well guess who's offering the most choices with their smart watch?

Grand Master

LaP

Posted
Posted

Was it automatically downloaded to your phone taking up space you may not want to spare?  I don't own one but what they did was wrong.

 

Strange the u2 album was not auto downloaded on my ipod. I guess it's an option you need to turn on.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Posts

    • Why Delta Chat is the best decentralized messenger you have probably never tried

      By Nas · Posted

      Oh, I did. And it's even worse than I was hoping! Besides a lot of techno-babble jargon (yes I understand 100% of it but it's still all just techno-babble) there's 2 key points that make me super-weary about even considering testing this out. -- By default, after installation, a relay is automatically set up, so you do not need to care about that. * Non-chatmail apps use email servers as a long-term message archive while chatmail clients use email servers for ephemeral instant message relay. * Supporting the full variety of classic email setups would require considerable development and maintenance efforts, and complicate making chatmail-based messaging more resilient, reliable and fast. -- Basically, the end-user device is the 'server' (relay) so there is NO ARCHIVING whatsoever because every message is necessarily ephemeral. Great for techno-paranoia (and for illicit activities preferring no tracks to cover) but terrible for everybody else. It's also ironically contradictory to engineering principles of redundancies besides the transport layers due to the explicit absence of any persistent storage. Instead of 'classic email address' retaining multi-GB messaging archives on its server, now every device must retain 100% of those storage demands. (Email messages were originally meant to be short correspondences, not the multi-MB attachments boondoggle that now exists with unlimited spam engines flooding every potential recipient.) Any device swap or reset (or loss) makes the entire message history go bye-bye forever... lest there's an off-device auto-archival "relay" mechanism that's really a separate server that holds onto all transported messages (an email server) that utilizes 'chatmail email address' identities (like an email server) and its own persistent storage archive (like an email server). But... this solution is hoping to exist alongside real-world email address identities (based on the email server relay pathway) but simply render messages in chat thread format in an ephemeral manner (with contents being encrypted, and messages auto-expiring) ... In the end, it's a chat app/experience for the Web3/P2P-at-all-costs zealots. (I have accts on all sorts of federated web3 services so I understand the technical and non-technical alike.) For any practical users, however, it's just another service to download/install, register, cross-share id cards/qr codes, but know that there's no history/archive whatsoever (by design) so no account/message recovery whatsoever... update the device, install a bummed update patch, or dare upgrade your device... all history, poof, gone. Ya gotta start everything over again like they're a brand new person.
    • You've tried DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, now get serious with SearXNG

      By zikalify · Posted

      You've tried DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, now get serious with SearXNG by Paul Hill Over the last decade, it has become quite trendy to dump Google Search in favor of privacy-preserving alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Brave Search. These search engines have done a very good job at highlighting dodgy practices by Google, such as adjusting search results based on what it thinks you’ll like (filter bubble) and stalking you around the web to advertise to you. While these search engines are good starting points when compared to non-private services like Google, there are still quite a few issues with them. For example, both DuckDuckGo and Brave Search require running non-free JavaScript in your web browser, which is comparable to running proprietary software on your computer, meaning you can be sure about what it’s actually doing in the background. Another issue is that these search engines are hosted on the respective companies’ servers, and you are using a service that you don’t control. Finally, DuckDuckGo, while offering privacy features, relies heavily on Microsoft’s infrastructure for its results and, in the past, has permitted Microsoft tracking scripts. If you are looking for a more private search solution than DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and Startpage, then I recommend taking a look at SearXNG. It is a privacy-respecting metasearch engine that can be used via different public instances, which is useful for mobile users, or you can install it on your computer or server and run it locally with maximum control. Unlike Google, Bing, or Brave Search, which crawl the web and have their own search indexes, SearXNG is a metasearch engine, meaning it taps other search engines, stripping your identifying data, such as IP address, user agent, and cookies, in the process. Your search query is sent to the other search engines you enable before aggregating the results. SearXNG has deployment flexibility. If you are a casual user or a mobile user and don’t want to run SearXNG locally, you can use a public instance that is hosted by someone else. The main problem with this is that you are putting trust in the maintainer of the instance regarding stuff like logs that they may keep; good hosts should have a privacy policy explaining their policies. If you are trying to use SearXNG, you can also install the software on your device and then head to 127.0.0.1:8080 in your browser and search from there. While you don’t have to worry about a third-party admin like the public instances, search engines could ultimately block your IP address if they frown on you pulling in their search results locally. If you want to run it locally, it’s a good idea to use proxies or VPNs to hide your actual IP. You don’t have to worry about this with a public instance, as search engines never see your IP address. The main privacy benefit of using SearXNG is that it isolates your identity from the underlying engines that it’s capable of searching, such as Google and Bing. These search engines will only see requests coming from a generic server, so they can’t profile you and create a bubble filter that influences what results you see. This also ensures that your search engine doesn’t turn into an echo chamber that prevents you from reading alternative points of view. As a free software project, you are allowed to inspect SearXNG to make sure there are no negative features bundled inside. This sets it apart from the privacy search engines mentioned earlier because you can’t check their source code. As a meta search engine, you are not restricted to getting results from one source. Due to the fact that it scrapes content from other websites, your SearXNG instance will periodically get blocked from different providers, so it’s good to select a range of sources as a backup. While enabling all of the services will give you great results, this can make searching slower. I am personally happy with slower searches for the best results, but you can always check which providers are slowing down your search from the search results page and disable them to speed things up. If you want decent results quickly, enable the main search providers such as Google, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Bing, and Yahoo. This way, you get wide coverage without the latency. On the Engines tab in Preferences, do note that there are different tabs, such as General, Images, and Videos, with their own providers that can be toggled and are not covered by "Enable all" while on the General tab, so be sure to dig into each. Just a note, if you want to enable everything, press "Enable all" in one tab, then hit save at the bottom of the page, then do the next tab, and so on. If you press "Enable all", then do that in each tab, and then save, nothing will stick. When I had just some of the search engines enabled, I searched “define nefarious” and results came back with the definition of “define” - obviously that was a sucky result. However, when I had everything enabled, it found dictionary pages for the word “nefarious” and even had an inline definition on the sidebar, which is quite nice too - that was delivered by WolframAlpha for anyone wondering! Probably the worst thing about this meta search engine is that the engines you select are saved with a cookie, so you must enable them on every new device you use SearXNG on, including if you decide to go into incognito mode with your web browser. Honestly, I would say this is the most annoying aspect, and perhaps if your browser lets you choose a separate private browsing search engine, then it would be best to use DuckDuckGo for this portion of your browsing. Another weakness of SearXNG is the random blocking of it by search providers. When you are on the results page, expand the “Response time” box, and it will show things like “Suspended: too many requests” or “access denied”. This is why it is good to enable several providers so that there is always a fallback to get results from. I won’t pretend SearXNG will be for everyone, however, if you enable all of the providers and put up with the slower response time, the results can be really amazing. Even if you don’t want to use it as your daily driver, keeping a bookmark handy that links to it is a good idea if you ever feel like doing a deep dive into a niche topic where other search engines are just failing to bring up any good result, due to the amount of sources it looks on. If you’re interested in radical user control over the software you use, installing SearXNG locally can also be a good idea, but be prepared to be temporarily blocked from sites if you trigger bot sensors without a VPN. Personally, I’ve opted to use a public instance, rather than install it myself. If you want to use it via a public instance, head over to searx.space to find a provider. Let us know in the comments if you have used SearXNG or its predecessor, Searx. What do you think about the quality of the results?
    • Windows 11 is getting redesigned taskbar settings in new build

      By Captain_Eric · Posted

      Dear Neowin, If it is not too much trouble, can you start using the new-ish designations for Insider Preview? "Experimental" is different than "former Dev" as it can apply to different models, eg 26H1 or 26H2 etc, right? No need to seed confusion IMHO. And, please "finally" update your graphics. OK?
    • Why Delta Chat is the best decentralized messenger you have probably never tried

      By zikalify · Posted

      Did you see their FAQ, its quite good. Have a look in the Advanced section. https://delta.chat/en/help
    • Apple MacBook Neo is a blessing for Windows users, here's why

      By Pandadriver · Posted

      Just install Linux Mint that is a real blessing and many times cheaper because you can continue using your old Windows computer/laptop with the latest Linux updates.

  • Recent Achievements

    • Week One Done
      Woland13 earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      Woland13 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • One Year In
      bernmeister earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Week One Done
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Week One Done
      tuben earned a badge
      Week One Done

  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      502
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      226
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      158
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      75
    5. 5
      FloatingFatMan
      71
    Show More

  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!