Sussing Out Spotify
Posted on December 5th, 2011 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Like everyone else I know, I joined Spotify, paying $10 a month for a streaming jukebox with almost any song you could want to hear. It’s an incredible tool—do I really want to buy the Cure’s early, extremely dark album, Pornography? I’d better give it a listen first—but parts of it are creeping me out: mainly, the Facebook integration. When signing up, I found that Spotify automatically retrieved my Facebook information before I’d entered even my email address. I don’t like the idea of multiple platforms cross-accessing my data, so I went to Facebook and turned off the “platform sharing” that Facebook automatically turns on—only to find that the only way to join Spotify is by letting them access your Facebook info.
Creepy, in my opinion.
Then, of course, Spotify automatically displays what you’re listening to on your Facebook feed; you have to know that, and you have to know to go to “Preferences” to turn it off.
And now, as I try to log back in for the first time since joining yesterday, Spotify is showing me a prompt that automatically checks a box saying, “Show what I listen to on Facebook.” It’s grayed-out, so that it’s less noticeable than the text around it. Pretty heavy-handed.
And after I have logged back in, Spotify asks if I want to erase all the music on my iPod and replace it with songs from Spotify. Why would I want to do that? What does that do for me other than make me more dependent on maintaining my Spotify subscription?
If I sound suspicious, well, I am. I don’t see how Spotify can make money charging subscribers ten bucks a month….so where does the revenue come from?
Wonder what other folks think of Spotify…
3 Responses
12/5/2024 9:38 am
Get used to it. The hard fact is that there is more money to be made by connecting and integrating identities than there is to be lost by creeping out a few old guys like you and me. How would anyone who is 12 years old (sorry, make that 13, no 12 year old can legally have a Facebook page) know that this is creepy? The convenience of seamlessness will be very hard to resist. Only one password to remember! No stupid variations on your handle to keep track of because richarbradley432 is already taken on that other site!
Here is a nice example of what we are going to see. Facebook is offering a very generous scholarship for PhD candidates in computer science. An entirely good thing and I am glad they are doing it. But to recommend someone for it, professors have to log in through their Facebook accounts. Don’t have one, and don’t want to open one? Tell your grad student to find someone else to recommend her.
12/5/2024 1:34 pm
I know—you’re right on all counts, Harry. But it’s very hard to get used to it, and I particularly share your feelings about how different generations view privacy. (You know you’re middle-aged if…you care about it.)
Fascinating about the Facebook scholarship….. Do recipients have to go work for Facebook?
12/5/2024 3:22 pm
No. That would be a loser — CS grad students are too marketable to need to indenture themselves. It’s just a gentle way to coax us into a created world, where everything happens from within Facebook. What could possibly be the harm?
The situation with youth and privacy is actually more complicated than that, as danah boyd has documented. They actually do care about privacy and are no fools. The universe just looks different to them. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128