IMO amaroK only fetches covers if you ask it to do so. Same for lyrics.
But indeed amaroKs asks Audioscrobbler for related tracks even if you do not have an scrobbler account and deactivate the checkbox for not sending played tracks (at least I saw that in beta2).

But I think the OP is right, there must be control by the user to prevent any sending to the internet, otherwise it\'s really like with windows applications where almost every application opens some ports to the net and doing \"hidden stuff\".
But so far it\'s just Audioscrobbler we have to concern about.

Marcel

P.S. Yeah, again future posts

Post edited by: marcel, at: 2004/12/31 17:27

i really like amarok and its features

i like the \'internet features\' (cover fetching, ...) too.
really neat and usefull features but as there coud be privacy concerns they should be configurable at runtime and off by default.
this kind of \'unasked\' internet access is one of the things i hated most about many windows programs.

so make a new tab named internet connectivity or something in settings.
it should look something like this :

[ ] allow internet access
.|-[ ] allow fetching of covers from amazon
.|-[ ] allow fetching of lyrics from ??
.|-[ ] allow fetching of sugested songs from ??
.... |-[ ] report listend songs back

a really important point is the mentioning of the connections other side.
as this makes things more \'transparent\' to the user you earn his thrust.
the same point goes for defaulting to off.

i dont see a problem for me but i think each user should decide that for himself

thats what linux is all about : choice

Currently I think the only feature that occurs without extra user interaction is fetching of the related tracks. Assuming I\'m not mistaken on that, a check box could be added to the audioscobbler tab

I don\'t really see the point of having options that just disable features like cover fetching. If some tin-foil wearing user doesn\'t want to use that feature, they can just not use it.

marcel wrote:

IMO amaroK only fetches covers if you ask it to do so. Same for lyrics.

imho this is not entirely correct

yes it connects only when you click at special places

but how should an user unexperianced with amarok know that
clicking on lyrics iniciates an internet connection
first time i assumed it tries to read common lyric formats from hd

same for clicking on an cover --> connecting to amazon

the user trigerd it - but was this what he wanted ?

and because these "are you shure" windows are really disturbing over time
this leaves settings in the config dialog

Well, Amazon is a compile time option, so I don\'t really see that as an issue.