App offered early access to rapper's new album for up to 1m fans but wanted more data than some were comfortable with
Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail is one of the most anticipated album releases of 2013, so the announcement that up to a million fans would get a free copy several days before its official release courtesy of a deal with Samsung was big news.
The music was to be delivered through an Android app for several of Samsung's smartphones, but as the album was released, some fans balked at the amount of personal data the app was trying to access.
The app – which has since been removed from the Google Play store by Samsung – was described by the technology site Ars Technica as "positively PRISM-like in its requests for your information", with fans prompted to agree to a number of app permissions before installing it.
Some of those permissions were necessary: for example, to store the downloaded files on fans' handsets.
Others, such as its request to access the device's location and information about other apps running on the phone, and to read the phone's status and identify when it's being used for voice calls, were more questionable.
In the run-up to the music's release, fans were also able to browse lyric sheets for the tracks – but only if they posted a tweet or Facebook status update promoting the fact that they had unlocked each lyric.
Ars Technica wasn't the only site to suggest that Jay-Z's app went too far, given recent news stories involving personal data and privacy.
"I can't be the only one who thinks it's creepy, especially when Edward J. Snowden's revelations have shown the extent of government surveillance of emails and phone records," wrote the New York Times' Jon Pareles.
"If Jay-Z wants to know about my phone calls and email accounts, why doesn't he join the National Security Agency? Nor is it particularly reassuring, to me anyway, that this example of data collection and forced speech was required by corporations – Samsung and Jay-Z's Roc Nation rather than the government."
Samsung reportedly paid Jay-Z $5m (£3.4m) for the rights to give away 1m digital copies of Magna Carta Holy Grail, in a deal hailed at the time as a positive example of brands and musicians working together.
Before the app's removal from Google Play, a significant proportion of reviews from the well over 500,000 people who'd installed it were positive, indicating that for many fans the app permissions weren't a concern.
At least the app was official. Last week, the internet security firm McAfee identified a fake version with Trojan malware embedded in it.
"On the surface, the malware app functions identically to the legit app. But in the background, the malware sends info about the infected device to an external server every time the phone restarts," explained McAfee's Irfan Asrar in a blog post.
"The malware then attempts to download and install additional packages … To paraphrase lyrics from Jay-Z, it seems Android malware has 99 problems and Android/AntiObscan just became another."
Some fans eschewed both apps in favour of turning to BitTorrent to download Magna Carta Holy Grail for nothing. The technology site TorrentFreak claims that the album was downloaded through torrent sites more than 200,000 times in a single day after its release within the app.
It's too early to tell what effect the app promotion and piracy will have on sales and streams of the new album, which was released on Monday in most of the world, and comes out on Tuesday in the US.
Apple's iTunes is selling the album digitally in the UK, while Spotify appears to have secured an exclusive – for this week at least – on the streaming version of Magna Carta Holy Grail.