Spotify is facing a privacy controversy as users allege that their private playlists were made public without their consent. This situation, similar to a previous issue, has raised concerns about an ongoing privacy problem. Users took to Twitter and Spotify’s community forums to report the unexpected change, with one user calling it an “absolutely unacceptable privacy violation.”
There’s a fundamental problem in modern people mindset: too much trust that everything will stay as it is now forever.
The only valid internet rule is: everything one puts on the internet can become publicly available and linked to one’s identity (name and surname) at any point in the future
It’s a tragedy that this mindset has become much less common over the past 10 years
The flipside of the same coin is that few people expect the sites and apps we use to respect our privacy at all anymore.
For example, pre-9/11 Google’s whole schtick was that they would never share or sell our data. At the time, a lot (though not enough) of people were outraged by their backtracking on this. Now, corporations have learned that we’re all numb to this. I’ve even had people lecture me about not “supporting a site” by viewing ads or sharing my real data on my account.
I’ve been guilty of this too, because we become numb to it. I’ve tried to switch to more privacy-respecting options, but I’ve still gotta use google services at work, still have too many friends on discord just to leave, etc.
Why is it so hard to spend at least a few minutes on how a change will impact privacy before implementing the change to millions of paying customers and without even informing them.
Because, in general, the dev and the code reviewer(s) can’t accurately predict the impact of the changes. It’s a consequence of having a massive and complex code base. Now, best practices say that they should have automation in place that runs before the pull request can be approved, that tests against regression and unintended consequences. But, far too often, these things are deprioritised by management because of the “ship it now, we’ll fix it later” mindset.
To put it more succinctly, infinite profit growth is the reason everything is shit.
So you’re telling me capitalism causes things to be shit? Who woulda thunk it!!!?
I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell you!!!
Are there any good streaming alternatives with privacy and consumer data rights in mind?
Maybe Apple Music. Thats what I use. If you don’t trust Apple you can just download music from the Internet to listen locally.
Jellyfin has an excellent music library mode.
The playlists aren’t actually public they just added a third, ambiguous category with some updates they made: “Recently Spotify has made some changes to playlist Privacy adding and extra level of privacy control. So all playlists that were previously Private are now Not added to profile, as the wording goes. This is why you see the option to Make Private on every playlist. Which means that your playlists were not made Public, they just appear to be categorized differently, so those playlists are still not visible for anyone who views your profile on any platform.”
Someone explain why this is a big deal. I feel like we have massive privacy concerns all over the place and this is just…not one of them.
How is this not a privacy concern? Data deemed private has become public. I agree music playlists are not as sensitive as health, banking or political associations for example but it is still of concern. Where would you draw the line between sensitive and not? Being privacy centric when handling personal data should be a core principle and any company breaching this principle should be exposed.
It isn’t.
Btw why doesn’t Spotify have a feature for an ai to create genre playlists (or any mood playlists you want) from your liked songs? If you have thousands of songs it’s impractical to trawl through them creating playlists
Uhm, it kinda does? On the Home page you have Daily mixes, which are pretty well grouped, and some other playlists. Although those seem to be based on your history rather than liked songs, which I personally prefer anyway.
I’m pissed. I just want to pay them money and use their service and now they blindside me. I spend a lot of time and effort on my playlists and like my privacy. Why can’t we have nice things anymore? I guess I will need to go back to old school mp3s and go offline again.
The article website is quite curious about privacy. Like you can’t refuse legitimate interest or allows ads publishers to link it to others device you could use…
