iTunes phones home to the FBI

Posted on May 23, 2020
Tags: software, society

Yesterday, after I started up iTunes, it gave me this error message:

iTunes can't verify the identity of the server www.fbi.gov

This would suggest that iTunes makes a TLS connection to www.fbi.gov on startup. Is it uploading a list of the songs in your music library to the FBI? Who knows! At this point, my imagination is running wild.

It’s also interesting to note that the string fbi.gov does not appear anywhere in the iTunes executable, so it must be obfuscated.