At Spotify, private listening is complicated
The music service says it’s reviewing privacy
Spotify is about as personalized as music services get, but it looks like a traditional broadcast medium in one way: It comes set up to share your listening activity with everybody who follows you on the service.
And since Spotify lacks the basic feature of a block function, “everybody who follows you” translates to “everybody.”
Years after user complaints about this problem of unrequested publicity – which in some cases can lead to harassment – Spotify still appears to be tuning up its response.
The Stockholm firm announced in a June 8 post that it’s working to add a block tool (and in the meantime invited users to contact its customer support to have offenders permanently removed from their followers). But its thin documentation and inconsistent interfaces combine to make it too easy for Spotify listeners to publicize their music habits.
First, Spotify’s mobile apps make your “Listening Activity” – artist and song title – visible by default in its desktop apps to anybody who follows you on the service. Spotify’s online help describes this, far down a long entry on “Data rights and privacy settings,” as an option to post your music choices to “Friend Activity” – never mind that few people would define uninvited followers as friends.
You can turn off this feature under the “Social” category of settings in most of Spotify’s apps: In the Mac and Windows programs, click the menu for your account at the top right and choose “Settings.” While in the iOS and Android apps, you tap the gear icon. Spotify’s web app, however, doesn’t offer this preference.
Spotify’s iPhone and iPad apps also offer a setting to stop it from posting your recently played artists to your public profile – an opt-out I did not see in other editions of Spotify’s app.
You also can make your listening anonymous by selecting “Private Session” from the user account menu (in the Mac or Windows apps) or the gear icon (Android and iOS), which not only cuts followers out of seeing your songs but hides the artists involved from your profile’s recently played artists list.
But you can’t make this your own default. As Spotify’s help notes: “The Private Session ends automatically when you restart Spotify, or after a long period of inactivity.” And its web app doesn’t include this option at all.
Spotify privacy: Complaints and customer service
More than four years ago, users complained about that last omission in a post on Spotify’s forum, which a company rep answered by saying “a few changes have been made to the web player” and marking that report “Not An Issue.”
With so many privacy issues to worry about, having your fondness for obscure indie rock exposed may not seem too bad. As Jen King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, commented in an email: “music is low on the list of privacy exposures (though get into podcasts and that might shift).”
But there also is an issue with basic customer service here.
Spotify publicists, while confirming details about defaults, did not address why the company had brushed off customer requests to change them or provide better controls for them. Fortunately, I had the chance last month to interview Sten Garmark, the service’s vice president for consumer experience, in an online panel as part of Dublin Tech Summit Virtual 2021. So I asked him about these points.
“Privacy is something that we’re always reviewing,” Garmark replied. “We’re also not just looking at what people are asking, but what we think is the right thing to do.”
Spotify, please listen to your executive here.