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Followed: The user always thinks of “Facebook” and “Google” when it comes to online advertising and tracking. Indeed, these companies are arguably the most prominent in the area of user tracking, but it seems Spotify has the ambition to compete with them, and it has the qualifications to do so.
Millions of users listen to music on their smartphones, tablets and personal computers daily through the Spotify app. Thus, every day, Spotify servers receive more than 100 billion data points from these users.
Spotify Data Tracking
Every small unit of data is enough to make Spotify more aware of users. This data includes the songs we listen to frequently, the way we listen to them, the listening times, as well as the activities that the user does while listening.
And as Spotify officially stated, this data is used to understand the tastes, feelings, way of thinking and other things of users. This allows the business to target users with advertisements in a professional manner.
The popular music streaming app currently has over 365 million active users. 165 million of them subscribe to paid plans not to listen to ads, compared to 200 million users who listen to ads and use the app for free.
What does Spotify know about you?
Everything a Spotify user does on the web version or the PC and smartphone apps is monitored by the company. This includes searching for songs and podcasts, playing songs, pausing them, shuffling playlists, and more.
For example, Spotify knows that you searched for a song related to the breakup, then searched for a playlist of songs related to the same months and spent two hours listening to it.
And since the music a user hears indirectly reveals how they are feeling and going through, it helps Spotify target that listener with personalized ads, not to mention other data they have about you during your use. of the application. .
And Spotify explains in its privacy policy what it does, but that policy is 4,500 words long, and one scholar described it as “using difficult and unclear language.”
And the strength of Spotify becomes more and more if you log into the app using an external means, like “Facebook” or “Google”, for example.
What can we do about it
There are some basic steps you can take to limit Spotify’s ability to collect and track your data on the one hand, and to maintain your privacy while listening on the other.
The first of these steps is to use Spotify in “private session” mode, a feature that can be enabled from “social options” in settings. But you will have to activate it every time you open the app.
It is reported that Spotify previously explained that what you listen to in “private sessions” may not affect your music recommendations, which means the app does not track those sessions.
On the other hand, on the “PC” platform, there is a basic option that must be activated, which can be found under “Settings” and under the heading “Show advanced settings”, and this option is “Remove blocking of cookies. and prevent their storage.
Spotify offers a number of other options for maintaining privacy, but only through its website. All you have to do is open the site, then go to “Privacy settings”, and from this page you can close all options related to data collection such as personalized ads and Facebook data.
The first one helps Spotify show you relevant ads by tracking your data, so it should be turned off. The second allows it to access your Facebook account information if you don’t close it.
Note: The content of this short story was written by Bitajarod and does not express the view of today’s Egypt, but it has been transferred with its content as it is from Bitajarod, and we do not are not responsible for the content of the news and the custody of the aforementioned sources.
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