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Comment by jalfresi | Hacker News Reader

Is this for real? I pay £10 a month to avoid this crap and now I'm lumped in as well?

Screw this, I'm off to Apple Music.

Why? Apple built your telephone; they already know about your "contacts, photos, or media files." They know your GPS location, too.

This reminds me of the quip about conservative folks threatening to move to Canada because they're unhappy about all the corrupting liberal values creeping into American politics.

Maybe that's part of the incentive. If Apple already have your data then you can't give it them twice. Better to limit the number of companies with access to your data to 1 by using the same company for everything.

This isn't a line of reasoning that appeals to me but I can see how you might want to go this route if you've already compromised on security and privacy to get a shiny new iPhone.

I am under no illusions that Apple keeps this information. I've opted out of iAds so I know that my data is not being used against me, and Apple do not sell my data to third-parties.

To be clear, Spotify using my habits and data to improve their service I have no problem with; it makes a better service for me! Same with Apple.

Maybe I should have explained clearer in my original comment (though I thought it was obvious) but I have no problem dealing with companies that I deal with; it's companies I DONT have an arrangement with who I have trouble trusting they wont use my data against me.

And now it appears that Spotify is one of those companies. And all I want to do is stream my playlists on the way to work. Now I have to consider that they may be selling my contacts lists, movements, etc;

It's a plain cash grab at my expense. And I wont do business with businesses that don't respect me or my data.

"It's a plain cash grab at my expense."

It is absolutely not.

Explain please how it is ABSOLUTELY not. It must be at least a bit, because you can tick off a few from the list of the definitions:

Noun

cash grab ‎(plural cash grabs)

    1. (derogatory) product designed without love or care, with the sole intent of generating profits 
    2. (politics) Legislation that serves primarily the purpose of generating revenue. 
    3. An activity engaged in with the intention of making money quickly.
    4. The money generated by a cash grab. 
    5. A game in which players attempt to grab as much money as possible.

Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cash_grab

You're doing exactly what Forbes wants you to do: fear mongering. Privacy policies are legal liability waivers. They are not statements of intent. There is absolutely no indication whatsoever that Spotify is harvesting your data and selling it to third parties to make some money on the side. That is a ridiculous assumption, and you need to provide damn good evidence if you expect me to even begin to consider that.

What any REASONABLE person would assume is that Spotify is simply doing what everyone else does, which is track your usage of their product in order to better target ads.

And we all know that if everyone else is doing it it's alright!

The next "reasonable" thing to do is to let them use your phone's camera 24/7 to film your life so that they can get an actually good grasp of your consuming habits.

I'm hyperbolising here of course but this trend of using niche features like syncing your playlist's BPM to your pace as an excuse to track even more data and destroy your user's privacy must stop.

"I pay £10 a month to avoid this crap"

I don't understand this concept. I pay $10 a month get rid of ads, to be able to use the mobile app, and to get higher quality streams. There was never any reason to believe being a paid member had any impact on the data Spotify collects from you.

I notice two things: 1) why shouldn't Apple collect the very same data? 2) apparently users are willing to pay for privacy, that's pretty cool! Something like vysk will actually have some space.

"1) why shouldn't Apple collect the very same data?"

How do we know they don't? Has anyone read the privacy policy lately?

I mean, the only reason anyone flipped about Microsoft's privacy policy is because they took the unusual step of making it understandable to the layman. And they were crucified for that.

From a juridical point of view that was really nice of them. It's a step toward Latin Law, where each man is entitled to understand what he is signing (opposed to the Anglo-saxon where you assume anything can get signed, therefore you need additional laws to protect the people - I am not commenting on such laws)

It appears that the privacy policy makes several references to advertising. I pay money so I don't receive any advertising, so Spotify make no money from me that way.

The part that concerns me is that my data can now be sold to someone else, with ever more excruciating detail about me. Thats the part that concerns me; I don't have an arrangement with those third parties.

My experience with panic about privacy policies is that they virtually always sound far worse than they actually are. For example, access to local files (contacts, photos, music) tends to be an all or nothing thing, and Spotify of course needs access to your local music files.

I also don't think they are selling your data to generate revenue. That's a baseless assumption at best and reckless fear-mongering at worst. The one area where many agree Apple Music has got the leg up on Spotify is music discovery. It's pretty obvious, to me at least, that Spotify wants to gather as much data as possible about what you listen to and how you listen to it, then have the freedom to pass that on to third-party data analysis companies who might be better than they are at identifying your tastes. The Discover Weekly playlist, for example, has been a big hit and was created by a company they acquired.

I'm sure the privacy policy is the same for everyone whether you're paying or not. As far as i remember, a huge part of spotify users don't pay, but listen to those awful ads (i have no idea how one can enjoy music with ads).

So i'm pretty sure, they won't show/play us (paying) customers any ads. Because if they would, many people will cancel their subscription (me included).

To be fair, I opened the privacy policy from Spotify just now (I think I updated to a newer version yesterday?) and I don't see any of these things mentioned in the privacy policy, so might wanna hold your horses.

I moved to deezer. Waiting for android support for apple music. Spotify are gone for me when they ruined their desktop app.

You're complaining about Spotify's desktop app and yet you'd rather use iTunes? That's rich.

If it's not farming out your private data to third-parties, it already has a killer feature for me.

> android support for apple music

Is that a thing? I thought Apple Music existed only to push iDevices.

It's been part of Apple musics announcements since the very beginning

Or, use the money to buy albums (the old fashioned way) and put them on your device or dropbox or whatever. Then you don't spray your private information around the galaxy.

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