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.
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.
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.
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