Stop Spotify Surveillance
stopspotifysurveillance.org
stopspotifysurveillance.org
I don't think the author knows what a patent is, because I also don't get the impression that the point of this is make the idea public domain instead of owned by one company.
I'm not singing up for what seems like a mix of legit concerns and ... borderline conspiracy theory / ideas that maybe really don't help the cause.
I'm inclined to sympathize with a lot of this but I'm not getting on board an unknown / the whole crazy train.
The Whois on the site says that it was registered on April 5th of 2021 for 1 year and the customer is based out of Ontario, Canada. Tucows was the registrant, and they seem to be a generic handler of web domains, based out of Toronto. https://tucows.com/
Other than that, I can't really find out any additional info about the site or who is running it.
I'm sure other HNers are more adept at searching for these kinds of things, and I'd love to know more about the paper-trail of it.
If your browser supports searching text you'll find it too.
I am typically sympathetic to fighting over-aggressive surveillance for profit; I am wary of it more when govt uses it, but it can be dangerous with companies too. This is a valid concern.
The creators of the site clearly had a chip on their shoulder before this patent. It could read like they are "just mad" at Spotify for a number of reasons, and that this isn't a big deal. I think the EFF does better at selling the problems of seemingly benign tech.
I am beginning to get allergic to appeals to trans-this and racist-that when it seems so tangential: This isn't some systemic racist policy of government where the intent is muddy but the effect is clear - this is a creepy program that is made to make money on targeting services, whether you're trans or not.
>Emotion recognition software is largely seen as racist pseudoscience
It's like they're trying to derail the conversation they started. Why do so many petitions just throw a bunch of arguments in there and hope one of them sticks?
This petition is the sort of thing I'd come up with if I was asked to build a false flag operation to discredit people that care about privacy.
Have we already forgotten that PRISM proved that data collection is outsourced to companies? They're basically one and the same.
I see this claim frequently being made in such contexts, but it's never explained. Spotify playing music that matches your mood hurts trans people?
Machine learning detection of people’s gender in the real world is anywhere from annoying to distressing to trans people because all the training data is cis people and so they get matched with their AGAB. Can you imagine how terrible it would be to already hate and be super self-conscious about your voice only to have Spotify start telling you via recommendations that you don’t pass well enough. Yikes.
Although the patent may be creepy...
The text of the patent refers to media recommendation (not advertising) - contrary to the sibling comment where you claim it will result in ads for Dollar Shave Club, the patent does not once use the term "advertising". Sure, it could be used for that, but I don't think that's the main intention at all.
How are you going to know that Spotify has recommended you a song based on your gender? Are we assigning genders to songs now? Straight white cis males can like Aqua's "Barbie Girl", too.
This is an absurd take. Do you see no difference between Spotify recommending songs to a trans woman based on what men with similar music tastes in her area and age group are listening to and "assigning gender to songs?"
Spotify also typically recommends you playlists rather than songs and my home page is extremely gendered. I get playlists like "You Go Girl", "Girls Like You", "Women of Rock", "Fierce Femmes." A trans guy getting these kinds of recommendations would be ... well odd.
At the moment, but I think the idea behind this patent is that it can factor in your mood (and other factors, such as gender) into the recommendation engine as well as what you already like.
Though I don't see gender being much of a signal. My GF and I have exactly the same taste in music (well, she doesn't like Classical that much, and I don't like Musicals, and she's more into Goth/Industrial/Metal than I am, but it's a 90% match). Anecdata, but that's all I have.
Like recommendation engines aren't magic -- they look at what people "like you" listen to where "like you" has all sorts of random demographic data as well as your personal patterns/history.
It's maybe not that bad of the grand scheme of things, but it's inarguably racist.
> Queer indie-punk musician and Fight for the Future director Evan Greer has released a new music video for the song “Surveillance Capitalism,” ahead of the release of the album Spotify is Surveillance.
That raised a red flag for me. Why is this person's gender identity in any way relevant to the issue at hand?
In the same way the text calls out emotion recognition software as "racist pseudoscience" (then linking to an article about facial recognition) - which doesn't have much at all to do with the patent.
Bought to you by the "Union of Musicians" - the same people who claim Spotify make "enormous profits" (I wouldn't call them enormous) and want 1 cent per play.
They want Spotify to pay them, but they also want to damage Spotify's reputation? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot
Further to that, check out the Union of Musicians' subcommittees [1] - there's a "Classical Music Accountability" subcommittee (classical music = white supremacy?)... and a Police Abolition committee, of course.
The group seems to be sidetracked with every single cause, a subcommittee for every minority group... which, to me, takes away from the main purpose of a Union of Musicians - getting paid/treated properly (as a whole).
Which just reminds me of how this webpage gets sidetracked from the main issue. The main issue should be: listening in on conversations is creepy.
A trans woman constantly getting ads for dollar shave club, Nivia for men, and Weezer is hugely invalidating simply because some machine learning algorithm says she sounds like a man. Good god imagine having to perform a stereotypical version of your gender identity for your phone just to get the recommendations you want.
Time to support and use alternative, free/libra, self-hosted solutions. https://funkwhale.audio is one off top of my head for Spotfiy.
Spotify (EDIT: for some people) solves the content problem for a low fee. Self hosted requires either spending lots of money, or in lots of regions something that probably qualifies as copyright infringement.
(EDIT: noted that this isn't universally solved, and thanks for responses pointing this out)
> Disk and USB space are cheap
Apologies for any ambiguity. When I was refering to spending lots of money, I wasn't considering the costs of self hosted infrastructure (servers, backups), but rather the cost of acquiring the media in the first place.
Similar to the Amazon "wage cage" patent that spawned so many memes and bad press.
This went so against my ethos I quit and found another job.
I mean Spotify has been one of the biggest driving forces in reducing music piracy, in part thanks to being more convenient.
On the other hand, they don't pay artists nearly enough so the flipside is that to the artists it doesn't actually make that much of a difference whether someone listens to them on Spotify or just pirates the music.
Well, yeah, most of the time? Can you name a unicorn that doesn't collect and use data en masse?
The solution is to firewall the internet in the UE.
Sometimes companies file patents on dark-pattern type techniques just to prevent other companies from using those techniques.
Also, I guess the website creators don't realize this, a lot of speech recognition can be done completely on the device with the audio and the recognized words never leaving the device. (Modern mobile OS versions and increasingly desktop OS versions are giving the end user more and more control over whether they allow anything beyond this, on a per-app basis.)
The service could, for example, boil everything down to just one bit of information: The user likes this song. Or does not like this song. True, or false. One bit. That's pretty far from the drama presented on the website.
If you like electronic music I can recommend Digitally Imported (https://www.di.fm/).
The best part is that I don't need to find new music since it's radio. Also it's like half the price of a spotify sub.
That said, the vast majority of people is not aware this is happening, will just hit 'agree' on anything that asks permission, etc. The only thing protecting them is legislation. It's up to people like you and me that are actually aware of these things to fight back.
I mean if it wasn't for 'us', tech- and privacy savvy people, secure and encrypted communications, privacy laws, etc would not be nearly as much of a thing that they are now.
That service you mentioned mentions that data will be exported to the US: https://www.di.fm/member/privacy. They don't seem to mention what user statistics or tracking they do though.
I use spotify ~8 hours a day during the work week. ~1750 hours of streaming last year (music, podcasts, etc.)
Two days ago, my iPhone updated the Spotify app. When I opened the app, the very first popup was "You can now use Spotify's voice controls! Say 'Hey Spotify' to try it out."
The documentation linked to the banner was all about how Spotify intends to start recording ambient audio from the phone's microphone, including what I assume would be any conversations.
I don't specifically agree with the sentiment of this website, but the idea of Spotify collecting audio is just another example of under-regulated tech companies willing to push ethical assumptions to their breaking point, all for the sake of making more revenue.
"Is Spotify recording all of my conversations?
No. Spotify will begin receiving your voice input data when you press the action button or say the wake word or (for voice ads) when you hear an audible tone, and continue until Spotify has processed your question or request.
The device will always indicate to you when Spotify is receiving your voice input, for example with a visual indicator or an audible tone.
When listening for the wake-word, Spotify listens in short snippets of a few seconds which are deleted if the wake-word is not detected."
https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/privacy-policy/plain/#12-ch...
We may occasionally make changes to this Policy.
When we make material changes to this Policy, we'll provide you with prominent notice as appropriate under the circumstances, [...] We may notify you in advance.
Please, therefore, make sure you read any such notice carefully.
If you want to find out more about this Policy and how Spotify uses your personal data, please visit the Privacy Center on spotify.com to find out more.
Except it doesn't say that at all.
is it because it is a successfull european company?
https://www.stopspotifysurveillance.org is using Cloudflare SSL!
There is widespread suspicion that Facebook Inc already does this (they deny it, but I've heard and experienced too many anecdata to believe them).
Speaking as someone who can at times be a targeted-ads apologist, conversation-snooping software is an abhorrent invasion of privacy that I can't imagine anyone would be happy with.
Why spread an easily testable lie? People have checked, they don't do this.
BTW, I didn't claim that they do this, only that I and others suspect they do.
Personally I've seen cases were a topic was discussed aloud which was not searched/browsed by either party and received ads very shortly thereafter. Extremely specific stuff, like you randomly talk about life insurance and then get a life insurance ad.
Unless you think they are 'being sneaky' by developing zero day exploits to break permissions boundaries and prevent logging on both Android and iOS.
What's more likely is that: (a) we're all a lot more predictable than we'd like to admit, and (b) you underestimate the multitude of data sources available to Facebook and piped over to its ecosystem. Just because an ad is on Facebook, doesn't mean Facebook is the one providing all the targeting data.
Pretty much, yes. Perhaps only one of the two operating systems, and perhaps not all versions.
I'm not confident they've done that, but it'd be hard to prove they haven't, and frankly it seems like the kind of thing FB might do (I'm sure not everybody would agree).
It's certainly possible that FB is just wildly superior at understanding/predicting people than humans are. Their targeting is, after all, really good.
Source: https://www.lifewire.com/how-facebook-messenger-apps-drains-...
> Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps for iOS and Android devices consume a lot of battery life. Besides complaints from people worldwide, authorities and analysts conducted tests. They affirmed that both are battery hogs even when the apps aren't in use.
I'm not sure how one would be expected to notice a "large upload of audio" since most people don't monitor their network activity, and slowdowns get blamed on a bad connection. I'd also expect smart FB engineers would be able to figure out how to minimize network activity (eg; sampled, low-fidelity audio).
EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean to say, "they use lots of battery therefore they must be spying", just that lack of battery drain isn't convincing evidence that they're not doing some sort of conversational spying.
It scanned the filesystem to find local media files to present for playback. It used P2P to legally share locally cached parts of DRM:ed Spotify tracks to other users in order to lower Spotify's bandwidth costs.
Did you also ban Skype?
It was well known at the time. How do you know it was not sharing other files it found?
Making use of of peer to peer protocols to distribute content is something I wish more companies did.
P2P lowers the barrier to entry for new players in a domain, because it allows us to bring a product to the consumers with potentially drastically lower cost of operating, because we can provide service to our users without the massive bandwidth costs to our business.
This is good for the consumer too. So don’t be mad at companies that use P2P technology. Be in favor of it. And demand better terms from your ISP instead. So that the internet can continue to allow for innovation and competition, instead of further centralizing all of the power to only the biggest companies and slowing down innovation and hurting competition.