RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser said his company never marketed the data that it secretly collected from music listeners--a statement which may indicate a course his legal team could take, should three class-action suits against the company ever go to court.

''We didn't collect globally unique data,'' he said during a question-and-answer session after his keynote presentation at the Webnoize '99 conference in Los Angeles yesterday (11/15).

''Data was transmitted,'' he said, implying a distinction between the ''transmission'' of user information and its long-term ''collection'' for marketing purposes.

Glaser did not speak directly about the lawsuits, which charge that RealNetworks allegedly violated various consumer protection and state privacy laws. Instead, he repeated his position that his company did not use the information that the RealJukebox software did, in fact, both collect and transmit.

''We never kept personal information. We never marketed against it,'' he said with his rapid-fire delivery.

During the main part of his presentation, Glaser introduced the new RealPlayer 7 and called for standards for portable music devices and cheaper memory storage for music files. When he discussed privacy, he spoke in generalities.

''Consumers expect privacy,'' he said. ''They think of it as a relationship. The risk of alienation is high if industry practices don't improve.''

Users and privacy advocates across the country seemed quite alienated two weeks ago after an independent security consultant discovered that the RealJukebox digital music player/CD ripper program reported listener information back to RealNetworks. The information was linked to globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) which were individually assigned to users when they registered the software. The company has since issued a patch to stop the monitoring.

Glaser said that an outside audit of the information that RealNetworks collected and of what happened to it would be completed by the end of the year. The audit is being conducted by Truste, a non-profit group that issues seals of approval to websites that disclose what user information they collect and how users may control its dissemination.

After an initial investigation, Truste said last week that it would not revoke RealNetwork's seal because Truste oversees only websites, not software. Critics saw the move as a convenient loophole, while some in the Web music industry praised RealNetwork's quick issue of the patch and its willingness to have the audit.

Addressing the Net music industry at Webnoize, Glaser encouraged software makers to issue software privacy statements and said that programs should give users the right to choose what kind of information a company could collect about them. Many states already have laws to protect consumers against marketing techniques which use personal information without consent.