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Comment by nerflad | Hacker News Reader

Cute? No. These ads are smug and tone-deaf. Complete disregard for privacy has become the rule rather than the exception on the internet, and these ads practically celebrate that. I don't care if the data is anonymized.

I've never had a Netflix account and I've already started building my .flac library back up and will be cancelling my spotify subscription. The convenience of these services is not worth their disrespect to me as a customer.

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Devil's advocate: what is harmful about using anonymised data this way? In an actual "this is how it will negatively affect you" sense?

I ask because while I share your concerns (perhaps not to the extent you do) sitting on HN agreeing with each other does little, and neither does cancelling our accounts. What you'd need to do is explain to a vast number of users why this is problematic in very clear terms, and I'm yet to see anyone actually do that.

Things like this can happen when corporations know more about you than you think: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Anonymized data generally is not very anonymous. You can only trust that data is actually anonymous if there exists no non-anonymous dataset with which you can cross reference the anonymized data, and you can guarantee that no such database will ever exist.

I'm willing to bet that many "anonymized" datasets are of the kind which could relatively easily be deanonymized, especially datasets which are frivolously used to make ads "funny".

That's an incredibly broad statement; we are talking about what movies people have watched on netflix. What possible non-anonymous dataset could you be cross referencing to de-anonymize it? Even if you could, who cares?

I just responded to my parent comment's premise:

> what is harmful about using anonymised data this way?

Whether it's harmful to use such data when it's not anonymous is a different discussion.

Sure, but what is harmful about the statement.

Dear person, who watched $show $number of times in one $time, $snarky_comment?

Netflix themselves might know who this person is, but there's no way anyone reading the tweet is going to be able to link it back to a specific person. Are you concerned that Netflix can query their own data?

What if you were the person who watched that show N times, and then saw that ad? It'd be a weird feeling, right?

Because they are using them to single out individuals (even if those are anonymous) - people expect them to at most use that data privately (ie to see what you probably like) and to have aggregate things (ie this is the most popular $ITEM on weeknights).

And to that that Netflix was condescending and quite frankly rude.

> Complete disregard for privacy has become the rule rather than the exception on the internet, and these ads practically celebrate that.

Ahahaha, has me in tears, really. For all we know, these claims could as well be made up. We can't verify that 53 people watched any movie 18 days in a row. Why? Well because they didn't actually violate these peoples privacy by dropping their names. The only entity that could use this information and track those people down is the NSA (correlating Traffic). But they wouldn't need tweets to do that.

My point is: Please stop making a fool out of yourself. There are really harmful players out there, people that can ruin your life not your audio listening experience. Rage in the right direction.

> For all we know, these claims could as well be made up.

The companies have confirmed that is not the case.

> They didn't actually violate these peoples privacy by dropping their names.

The articles mentions a Spotify ad that said “To the person in NoLiTa who started listening to holiday music way back in June, you really jingle all the way, huh?" I mean, how much more specific can you get? Nolita is five square blocks[0]. If you think I'm making a fool out of myself by being concerned with this, I don't know what to tell you.

[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Nolita,+New+York,+NY/@40.7...

> The companies have confirmed that is not the case.

Okay, so we can't trust them with data but their statements are 100% to be taken seriously? Slightly contradicting.

> how much more specific can you get?

Well, put their names on it

> Nolita is five square blocks

Umm, yeah in New York City, meaning we are talking about 50k people [0].

[0]: https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan/NoL...

What level of specificity would you no longer be comfortable with? If it had been 500 or 50 people, would that still have been okay? How you can be sure that this data is inocuous? You can't predict the intentions of every stalker or bad actor that might have access to this data or be able find a use for it.

Listening habits can make a good forecast for other lifestyle habits; i.e, he listens to a lot of jazz, maybe I can find him at Maxwell's drum shop. She streamed a song by Purity Ring 25 times, I bet she'll be at their show in Brooklyn this weekend.

> he listens to a lot of jazz, maybe I can find him at Maxwell's drum shop. She streamed a song by Purity Ring 25 times, I bet she'll be at their show in Brooklyn this weekend.

He/she is on Hacker News, showing off his/her New York specific knowledge and making vague points about privacy. He/She is probably an software engineer living in NYC. \s

Sure listening habits are information worth keeping a secret, but that's not the topic discussed here. And all they said is that someone in NoLiTa listened to Christmas tunes in June. That is nothing of value for anyone and Spotify and Netflix did a good job not doing harm to anyone by this campaign. Again the real privacy invaders are somewhere else, sitting there silently collecting your data!

It doesn't matter if it's made up. At the very least it appears as though Netflix and Spotify are completely disregarding privacy, and that's all that really matters.

Whose privacy has been disregarded here?

I'm talking about appearances. It does not matter if anyone's privacy was actually violated, what matters is the message the ad sends, and that message is "we're looking at the exact viewing habits of individual people".

Unnecessary harsh i think.

I liked it and probably 99% of all customers did this too or didn't care.

Nerflad is exactly on point with his harshness if you ask me. I don’t care for those ads at all and they prove that privacy is a non-issue for Spotify. It paints the picture of employees perusing my data to see if there is anything funny to take to a weekly show and tell. All the while laughing at our stupidity as customers for trusting them.

Your comment makes me wonder how you believe this data is viewed in the business. I work in BI, who are usually the developers who turn such data in to insights that can be comprehended by the people in businesses who don't know the first thing about databases. Just from my personal experience in such analysis, I think it's highly unlikely they're looking at the "who" behind the weird listening patterns they're reporting on.

It's much easier to report anamolous behavior in the form of anonymous aggregations than it is to report on such a fine granularity as individual listening patterns. A simple SELECT statement with an DESC order by and a SUM aggregation could yield that Sean Spicer statistic, without every touching a specific individual's data.

Such detailed reporting tends to actually be counter-productive, as it usually leads to information overload. I highly doubt that any analyst within Spotify has ever looked specifically at your history.

This doesn't matter. The public audience of these ads doesn't know any of what you're saying. The important thing is how it appears.

If my job was limited to what was understandable to the average consumer, I likely wouldn't have a job.

In this example, you're absolutely right, and if all they had was my name and my listening history, that wouldn't be so bad. But some of the ads do reference specific individuals. Spotify in particular have made it clear that 1.) listening behavior profiles may be "anonymized" in the sense that they have had the names sanitized from them, but there is a myriad of other potentially identifiable data, such as location, that has not been sanitized, and 2.) they are willing and able to comb through this data to find anomalies.

You're right about some of the ads touching the individual level, but if they're following any "best practices" in their data models, those individuals are likely just unique identifiers.

Granted, everything I'm saying is most certainly speculation. There could most certainly be some folks scouring this data with insensitive intentions. I'm just pointing out that that there are actual technical AND practical limitations to doing such reporting effectively.

It is a matter of appearance. I know how databases work, I am a developer myself. The point in was making is that apparently Spotify is very comfortable with the image of them looking through their customer's data and use it whichever way they find fun/profitable. I expect them to analyse listening behaviour in order to recommend certain sponsored content, I expect them to connect my listening to other's listening in order to recommend music to me, I expect them to use my listening behaviour in order to sell insights to the music industry on how to sell better to people with similar music preferences. What I did not expect however is that they would sift through my playlist titles in order to find out whether there is something embarrassing in there for them to use in their advertisements.

What is next?

Spotify ad: Dear Mosselman, who has listend to his playlist "Oh no Veronica, why did you leave me?" 100 times in the last week. Veronica isn't thinking about you anymore, shes listening to _her_ playlist "Thank god for Mosselman's brother and his good lovin'" since day 1.

Worse, they are a campaign to make this behaviour acceptable.

How I would feel: to the 300 morons who took the train on 31 december to south of The Netherlands, WTF are you doing in that crappy rural area?

How naive could you possibly be to think that Spotify or Netflix wouldn't have had this sort of data?

I don't see anything wrong with the ads, not because it isn't fucking creepy, but because you'd have to be an idiot to think that they don't have that much data and because there was no personal information shared.

By using these types of services you're implicitly (explicitly? Wouldn't be surprised if it was in ToS) agreeing to have pretty much everything you ever do on their platform collected, and if you're lucky anonymised.

Without piracy I have two problems with my music collection:

1. My running playlist would cost $700+AUD to buy.

2. Most places don't have FLAC available or even 320kbit MP3

I encourage you to check out https://hdtracks.com. As far as the expense goes, yes you're right it's a drag. One thing I like to do is buy used CD's on ebay or Amazon (usually about half price from a reseller, or even cheaper from private sellers) and rip them to flac.

Yep, I think the last time I looked at hdtracks, less than 20% of the songs I wanted were there, even without taking into account the asinine geoblocking going on there. Don't they also force you to use a pretty terrible download client?

And yes, I've grabbed discs from eBay and Discogs, but it takes up a lot of time. Then, if I get rid of the disc (or omg, sell it to the one person left who wants discs) am I still allowed to play it? I don't like dumping CDs in landfill.

>buy used CD's

If artists receive nothing from such trades, why not just pirate (assuming you do not care about physical disc)?

For me, I don't have a "Collection" of music I like. My tastes are hard to define, ephemeral, and silly. I will play a song hundreds of times and then a week later never play it again. I want to support artists but doing so through anything other than a subscription process would bankrupt me

I'll go one step further and say that they are actually mean-spirited. Read this again- "To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?"

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