iTunes update spies on your listening and sends it to Apple?:
A new version of Apple’s iTunes for Mac appears to communicate information about every song you play to Apple, and it’s not clear if there’s any way to turn this off, nor what Apple’s privacy policy is on this information.
read the whole article for the details, but it all has to do with the iTunes mini-store, a new pane in the UI. When a. that’s open (you can turn it off with a button at the bottom right) and b. you start listening by double-clicking on a song, iTunes passes your current selection to a “customer experience company” and it populates the mini-store with contextually relevant choices for further listening.
I suspect you could also shut this down by adding the destination to your hosts file and binding it to the loopback address đŸ˜‰ But I think shutting down the mini-store makes sense. It’s just clutter anyway.