Angelo Mandato

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Angelo Mandato
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  • Apple reportedly offered feedback on NPR's 'RAD' podcast analytics system

    Angelo MandatoAngelo Mandato
    This article is rather dubious, Apple attended RAD meetings, but so did everyone NPR invited. RAD spec was not drafted or even partially-drafted by Apple as this article is implying. I also attended some of the RAD meetings. Concerns about privacy and GDPR as well as batching requests when networks go offline came up when NPR pitched their RAD spec. They addressed the batching issue but RAD does not deal with the privacy issues, at least not currently.

    Until the privacy concerned are addressed in the spec we will not see any major podcast directory app adopt RAD. The problem is the RAD urls can go anywhere without the user's or application's knowledge. Without a centralized safe list to manage the RAD URLs to determine which sources are safe and will not impact the performance of applications, it will be a hard sell for Google or Apple to just bake-in call home to the mother-ship code when no one knows who or where the mother-ship is for each episode. To make matters confusing, RAD allows multiple RAD URLs, the thinking is that maybe NPR wants a ping back for ever 5 seconds of playback but maybe P&G wants a ping back when their ad for Ivory soap runs at 3:45. For a 30 minute podcast, this would result in 2 different mother-ships getting RAD pings, 1 to P&G and 360 to NPR.. Apple cannot simply allow the tracking back to random places, particularly when the pings could identify a user with a unique mp3 + providing the RAD server their IP address. The RAD spec needs to include a way for apps such as Apple podcasts to ask each user if they are ok with being tracked and to disclose whom gets the data. RAD currently does not address that.

    RAD has an immediate future with large enterprises who have their own apps. For example, NPR's NPR One podcast app can adopt RAD (if it hasn't already), it can easily present a terms of service and privacy policy in its app indicating that they are collecting this data and with which partners. With a network app they can control the mother-ship situation and also not violate GDPR and other laws.

    Someone should have Marco Arment‏, the creator of Overcast podcast app, weigh in on this thread. He's discussed this as a Podcast app developer last month on Twitter.

    Full disclosure, I am the CIO of Blubrry Podcasting.

    cgWerks