Facing a barrage of privacy concerns, RealNetworks said today that it will cease collecting some personal information from Net music listeners and will disable a feature in its software that could have been used to track users. RealNetworks already had quietly changed its privacy policy this weekend to disclose the controversial practice of monitoring RealJukebox users through unique identification numbers assigned to its software. The practice was reportedly discovered by Richard Smith, a Massachusetts-based independent security consultant, who had examined information generated from the RealJukebox software, as first reported in this morning's editions of the New York Times...

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