For those of you who, like me, were startled to have an unwanted U2 album show up in your account library on iTunes, Apple apparently has received a lot of flak for this. Because the BBC is now reporting that they’ve released a tool to remove it.

I’ve just tried it and can confirm that it removed the album from my list of hidden purchases, so the tool does appear to do the trick. If you want to completely nuke the album out of your library, go to the link mentioned in the BBC article and follow its instructions.

I hope now that this will be a lesson unto Apple about not messing with user data like that in the future. And hopefully next time they want to do a massive promotional giveaway like that, they’ll actually, y’know, tell people. As I said before, if a massively famous band like U2 wants to give their album away for free, more power to ’em, but they need to make sure that recipients actually know it’s going to come to them BEFORE it shows up in their libraries, and they should make sure the recipients actually WANT it.