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In our more privacy concious world, the policies that our favourite software makers operate under can be very important. In the wake of updates made to the music streaming service, Spotify's privacy policy, many fans have dropped the service, citing excerpts that demand access to their private media on their device, as well as their contact lists. To top it off, it also wants to share all of that data with third parties for advertising services, even if you pay the premium fees.
Since the announcement, many users – including a few familiar faces – have announced their intention to leave the service behind for one of its growing number of competitors.
.@Spotify Hello. As a consumer, I've always loved your service. You're the reason I stopped pirating music. Please consider not being evil.
— Notch (@notch) August 21, 2015
Spotify has attempted to curb the exodus of users with an explanatory blog post.
“We understand people’s concerns about their personal information and are 100 percent committed to protecting our users’ privacy and ensuring that you have control over the information you share,” it said, before clarifying just what it is that it does share with others.
It does use user photos, as initially suggested, but only when specifically given permission by the user, and even then only to change a profile picture or update cover art, apparently. A user's location would only be used (with express permission) to update someone on trending music in their area, or to help personalise recommendations based on other people's usage in that same area.
Microphone access isn't to record people, but to give Spotify the potential to use voice commands. At some point. It doesn't do so now. The same goes for contact lists, as in the future Spotify may make it possible to share tracks and playlists with friends.
But not now.
It also clarified that a lot of the information gathered would be anonymised before being shared with third party advertisers. “This is not new” though, Spotify said, suggesting that it had been sharing user data for a long time and was only now really telling them about it.
Spotify has now promised an updated privacy policy in the future.
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KitGuru Says: As much as this was meant to clarify the current position, Spotify's blog post seemed to suggest it wanted to collect a lot of data now, so it could ‘potentially' use it in the future. It feels like that's rather unnecessary.
Image source: Wikimedia
Already deleted my account with them. This isn’t even a case of too little too late, it’s a shameless abuse of customers’ trust by attempting to hide important privacy and security details in a legal document, followed by a defensive “… but we need to!”
Companies who want to use customer details should be totally up-front about it, and never try to get away with it by only mentioning these things in T&C documents (which barely anyone reads anyway, and which are purely there to protect the company: they are in no way helpful to the customer).
As an additional irritation, it took 3 e-mails to actually get them to delete my account – there is no way for the user to do this without sending a message. This meant that, having disconnected Spotify from Facebook, which I used to log in, I could not delete the account without reconnecting to Facebook, then using the online contact form to request account deletion. I then received an e-mail asking me to stay, to which I responded again that I wanted to delete my account. This was followed by ANOTHER e-mail asking me to stay to which I again responded that I wanted my account deleted. Why is there no option in the account settings to permanently delete the account? Why should it take this much time and effort for me to ensure that my account is deleted?
Sorry Spotify, but this is bad customer service on every level. First it’s the attempted deceit about your T&Cs, then it’s wasting my time in the aftermath, either deliberately or through negligence, neither of which shows your company in positive light.
I didn’t use Spotify all that much – I’m certainly not their core target customer and won’t be a loss to them. Thankfully for me, I never got rid of my own music collection from my purchased CDs/downloads, and have invested some time over the last few years in making it available to myself to stream when desired, so the only thing I lose by not having access to Spotify is finding some ‘similar’ artists – but there are other frankly more efficient ways to do that anyway.
So, basically they’re telling us not to get mad about them sharing our information with third parties as they’d been doing it all along, without our prior knowledge or acceptance? xD
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