Microblog Memes

People think sure, I don't mind them knowing which songs I listen to so they can give me recs and wrapped... But Spotify isn't just tracking which songs you are listening to the most. They are tracking every location, device, phone, PC, car, network, IP, WiFi, connected devices, what other apps you have on your devices, and more. With the data they have, someone can pinpoint everywhere you've been, every minute since you got the app, even who you've been with and what mood you were in. You can request the data and it's mindblowing. It's way more than is necessary or appropriate to track to give you a top songs list once a year. And other entities, including governments and whoever bought data from their latest beaches, has it too.

To be fair, a Service like Spotify would make absolutely no sense if they would not be tracking my listening preferences to propose me the kind of music I like.

Just listening to random stuff on the internet would be like radio in the good ol' days.

"tracking you"

It's their service, of course they know what you listened to.

Accurate: they turned ‘surveillance’ into ‘personalized vibes.’ Best branding trick is making people feel like the tracking is for them.

They don't personalize it by user, but it's usually fun to watch Pornhub's annual summary.

Using usage data to improve user experience and similarly worded sentences are in pretty much every apps "Terms of Service". They record what music I have listened to and compile playlist for me, so what? In similar manner navigation apps like Waze collect data about your driving habits to offer better routes.

It becomes an issue when:

1. They collect data irrelevant to the user experience or not connected in any way to the services the company provides.
2. They record activity for people who don't even have an account through third parties (looking at you Meta)
3. They scan every local network I connect to and collect detailed information (again... Meta)
4. They sell the data about what I listened and/or any other collected data to third parties
5. They use the data to train LLMs without my knowledge and approval, or opt me in by default and bury the option to opt out of this deep in the settings.

I haven't used Spotify for a long time, but I use YouTube. YouTube ticks most boxes of that list. I bet Waze do too, and Spotify maybe. That are for me the problematic areas we need to be discussing. Collecting data is not entirely bad. It is a good thing when that data is handled only in the user's interest, it's bad when it's being abused, which unfortunately is the norm rather than exception nowadays.

Steam review, too.

Is like to see the Wrapped for my 1273 trusted data partners.

Last.fm was obviously first.

Spotify isn't the only tech company with a personalised yearly wrap-up. Not even close...

I mean, even back in the day of listening to local .mp3s on my desktop. I'm pretty sure at least some of the software I used (Windows Media Player, Music Match Jukebox, probably others I can't remember) kept track of the title number of listens. I definitely remember going through and looking from time to time out of curiosity.

I also just love data and analysis. I love keeping track of things. I love sparking my memory, using data like this to remember a song I loved for like 3 weeks 8 months ago and forgot about.

I hate Spotify for a variety of other reasons. Once I've accumulated enough CD's or direct downloads to have a good sized library again i'm going to cancel it. But I do hope that whatever locally hosted open-source software I use for that will have tracking and analysis tools because it's fun.

Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.

I really like how Letterboxd used their big data. By using the Watchlist (the to-watch list of movies users wants to see) of everyone, they can find movies a lot of people want to watch, but it's impossible to stream and very challenging to buy, and license those movies for their online rental store.

In their defense, for a while there, they were the best algorithm out there. It was actually really good. Not anymore. It's fucking awful. One of the worst shuffles I've ever seen, super repetitive and actually insulting suggestions.

But also, everybody should dump Spotify for a shit ton of ethical and political reasons.

I'm like I've of the few people that didn't use Spotify I guess. After Google music went away I tried it, god it sucked. I dropped it in 2 weeks. Between Amazon music and Sirius xm I get the music I want.

Pretty sure last.fm has been around a lot longer than spotify