Spotify exposes users’ private playlists, again
The music service violated the privacy of its customers without their knowledge.
Music streaming service Spotify, officially unavailable in Russia since last year, has found itself at the center of a user privacy scandal. Customers of the service began to massively accuse Spotify of making their personal playlists public without their consent.
The scandal erupted when users reported this unexpected change to Twitter *, as well as on the Spotify community forums.
“It looks like @SpotifyUSA has quietly made all of my private playlists public without my consent. The same thing happened to my wife. This is a totally unacceptable breach of privacy. Has anyone else noticed this happened recently? I didn’t change any privacy settings!” wrote on his Twitter William Devereux, one of the key figures responsible for the development of Microsoft Edge
Similar complaints on the Spotify forum appeared back in March of this year. One of the affected users was a music curator who does professional music selection: “Why did this happen? Is there a way to make bulk lists private? I don’t want to waste the days of my life changing them one by one, I have over 1400 playlists.”
Then, in March, one of the users expressed his opinion regarding the privacy settings of Spotify. In his opinion, those playlists that users used to call “private” and “public” have now become “public” because they were never truly private, because they could be easily shared via a link. Although such a theory sounds, to put it mildly, strange.
Other users claim that their playlists were marked as “private” when they were created, and then inexplicably made “public” without their knowledge or consent.
In response to the March complaints, one of the moderators of the service stated: “Spotify does not make such massive changes and will not interfere with your collection / personal account settings unless you requested it.” However, since the problem is just getting bigger and bigger, that’s exactly what Spotify did, and perhaps unintentionally.
Nevertheless, it still remains unclear what is the general reason for such changes, whether the March cases are related to the July ones, and where to look for the guilty. This story is likely to continue.
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