Originally Posted by Somewhere Over the Atlantic
Isn't useful to whom? Anyone with their eyes half open over the last 10 years should have seen that, if data is collected on individuals and persisted, it is subject to eventual abuse, often despite the benign intent of the original collectors. Think of ISP's subject to giving up file-sharing details on their customers when confronted with subpoenas from the RIAA. That, too, was a list of IP addresses...
The difference, of course, is that file sharing copyrighted material is illegal. Listening to non-DRM music is not. Since anyone who has ever ripped a CD has non-DRM music on their hard drive, it becomes almost impossible to tell which users have legitimately acquired music, and which don't. It's very easy to determine which file sharers are breaking the law. If they're sharing your copyrighted content, they're guilty.
Of course, Apple claims they're not keeping the data anyway. If they're lying, they're almost certainly guilty of breaking the EU data privacy laws, as well as possibly the US ones.