Jon Pareles at the New York Times on the new Jay-Z album ‘app’ distributed by Samsung:
It demands permissions, including reading the phone’s status and identity, which made some users, notably the rapper Killer Mike, suspicious: Does Jay-Z really need to log my calls? It also gathers “accounts,” the e-mail addresses and social-media user names connected to the phone. Those permissions are often part of a typical app package. This one got worse.
This is damning on both sides; Jay-Z sold his fans down the river, and Samsung bait-and-switched their customers with a creepy app.
I’m sure this looked win-win in a boardroom; Samsung sells more phones, Jay-Z gets a fat wad of personal data from unsuspecting users that he can market to, monetize or sell later.
Shameful.