Many Last.fm users -- myself included -- were shocked when TechCrunch reported a story Friday evening that Last.fm and its parent company, CBS, handed over user-specific listening data to the RIAA. According to the unsourced article, the RIAA was interested in users whose profiles showed they had listened to U2’s recently leaked album, No Line On the Horizon. Of course, the story exploded all over the internet -- some Last.fm users even went so far as to delete their profiles.
But now that the weekend’s over, the Last.fm team is busy on damage control. A CBS spokesperson said that “to our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA,” and Last.fm systems architect Russ Garrett posted the following on the site’s forum that Last.fm “never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn’t consent to it. Of course we work with the major labels... but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party.” And according to Last.fm developer Jonty Wareing, “most of the Last.fm staff [would] walk out of the office door and never return” if the site had actually shared the data.
So, the whole shebang is still an unsubstantiated rumor, but seeing as the RIAA is always desperate to find new ways to ferret out illegal downloaders, let's just hope this scenario never actually happened or will never happen in the future. Either way, if you were one of those users who deleted your account, Last.fm says it can reinstate it if you contact their support, which means that Last.fm is storing all your data anyway.
