Contrary to many people perhaps, I actually trust Techcrunch to report the news as best as they can. It has gained a status of notoriety for reasons unknown to me and commentators on that site are what I would call Digg-people, but I do think they have a stake in reporting accurate news. Of course, with neither CBS, nor Last.fm commenting, we will probably never know for certain.

Also, since CBS is a US-company, I assume that the data (IF) released concerns US citizens. Nevertheless, having experienced, first- and second-hand, the behaviour of both the Dutch and German RIAA-counterparts, I am certain that any such data is being collected and passed on to European instutions also.

Of course, this whole argument (point 6) is moot if Techcrunch is actually wrong. I don’t believe it is in this case and was already very surprised how much leeway Last.fm was getting from CBS after the acquisition.

About point 6, though, Last.fm has quite aggressively denied that it has disclosed personal information to third parties. Of course, what last.fm’s users listen to has been available for pretty much anyone all the time (it being public with the APIs and all) so that shouldn’t really be news. Techcrunch is just talking probably out of their ass about leaking personal information part, because if last.fm really did that they would be pretty much in violation of EU Data Privacy laws.