17 Jan 09 Got a Napster account? They’ll share your info with Best Buy as of February 17, 2009

In case you missed the news, Napster was acquired by Best Buy back in September 2008 – that sale went through and we received the following email today:

Dear Napster Subscriber,

On October 25, 2008, Napster became a member of the Best Buy family of companies. As part of this change, beginning on February 17th, 2009, any personal or other data that you share, or have shared, with Napster may also be shared with Best Buy and/or its affiliated companies.

Similar to Napster, Best Buy is committed to protecting the privacy of its customers. Napster will continue to safeguard your data according to our strict privacy policy, set out at http://home.napster.com/info/privacypolicy.html. Best Buy also employs a similar stringent privacy policy, located at www.bestbuy.com/privacy.

Continued use of the Napster service after February 17, 2009 constitutes an acceptance of this new privacy policy. If you elect not to share your data with Best Buy, you will need to cancel your Napster membership before February 17th, 2009. In addition, if you prefer that your prior data not be shared, you will need to send a message to privacy@napster.com.

We are excited about our partnership with Best Buy and look forward to the many opportunities to provide you with an even higher quality of service that it will bring.

Your Friends at Napster.

So what does this mean? Basically, if you ever joined Napster – your information (including all your Napster account activity) will be shared with Best Buy as of February 17th! As stated in the message, if you forgot that you were a Napster member (check your junk mail folder for the above message) then you may not want Best Buy to get your account information. If they do, you can be sure that they will use it to send you targeted messages about the whole range of Best Buy products ; this is not necessarily a bad thing, and I’m quite confident that BB has a decent opt-out program.

Nonetheless, if you want to keep some semblance of control of your inbox, you may want to consider opting out of the information sharing scheme by sending them a request to privacy@napster.com – it’s most likely they will need to know your Napster account name (or email you used to register with Napster) to process your request.

The email I received had the links to their privacy policy and that of Best Buy encoded with a custom code so that they know that I was clicking through from the email they sent specifically to me.

Tags: Best Buy, IT Security, Napster, privacy