Digital News Production Unit- Researching the U2 Album story.

Recently whilst the script for our news network broadcast is being written, we have taken it upon ourselves to find more possible stories we could investigate, as well as research the one story we have definitely decided to run on our network; the story of U2's newest album "Songs of Innocence" being downloaded onto many Apple users devices without their knowledge or consent. 

The cover for U2's Album; "Songs of Innocence."

We hope that this particular story- in light of the recently iCloud hacking story and recent phone hacking scandals perpetrated by such large corporate conglomerates as the "News of the World" will help raise viewer's awareness of there device security settings, as well as raise the question that if corporations can so simply have data downloaded onto a user's device, what kind of information can they take from from it without the user's permission?

Although U2's album and the fact it has been distributed in such a way has been advertised as being a "free gift" from Apple and the band, it is obvious there must be some kind of larger corporate model to this other than them doing it out of "the kindness of their own hearts" so to speak. And after some brief investigation online, I found that this could possibly be the case.

According to U2's official website, Apple's Head Tim Cook reportedly said that "Songs of Innocence" would be "the largest album release of all time."

The members of U2.

Now of course, it would indeed be the largest album release of all-time, due to the fact that it was being distributed and delivered to people's apple devices without their knowledge. This opens up many doors for both Apple and U2, as Apple can begin to claim that their products were a part of the biggest album launch of all time, and U2 can make the claim that their album had one of the biggest launches of all-time. The fact that it was a digital download- for free- without the user's permission becomes irrelevant when making that claim.

This of course opens up a whole new can of worms in the sense that we can then discuss the subject of logistical and statistical "manipulations" by corporate entities such as apple for the purpose of publicity, however, our main aim will be to simply stick with the story that many Apple user's feel that their privacy has been breached as a result of this story.

I will continue to investigate.