The original post: /r/piracy by /u/Teppiest on 2024-10-12 03:55:23.
I was hunting music down, ironically enough, not for piracy but on the hunt for lost media. When I managed to find and source the music I looked over the metadata and found a tracker tag which I assume is unique to the account ID. My natural assumption is that if this music gets distributed the company would be able to get hold of the file and trace it back to the account that originally downloaded it.
I've never heard of this before, nor have I seen it before. I guess I've never really gone looking for it specifically either. But I've never seen in guides or tutorials on any site to scrub the metadata for unique identifiers. It seems like pure coincidence I stumbled on it.
The most interesting thing to me is that this isn't even data you'd find in the details tab of windows. It was specifically in the metadata that I'd used Dbpoweramp or Foobar2000 to access. If I didn't use either of these programs I would've been none the wiser.
Screenshot showing the stock "details" window. As you can see, no identifiers are visible.
Screenshot showing the unique identifiers made visible by Foobar2000.
Naturally I obfuscated some of the information like the album, artist, etc. Kind of not in the mood to gamble with companies that put tracers in their music. Granted this site was pretty far off the beaten path. Some music is excellent at hiding.
What do you guys think? Is this something that's actually common and I somehow missed that day of sailor school. Or is this as unusual as I think it is?
