| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper" |
|---|
| |
>
> | Spotify: The Trade-Off Between Data Privacy and Personalization | | | | |
<
< | Spotify & Data Privacy
-- By Dan Carlston - 11 Mar 2022 | >
> | -- By Dan Carlston - 11 Mar 2022 (edited 30 Apr 2022) | | |
Introduction | |
<
< | The music streaming giant Spotify has undeniably transformed the landscape of music in the 21st century. In an industry facing rampant piracy and accessibility issues, Spotify quickly became the dominant force in the market by making music streaming accessible and bringing innovative adaptive playlists and social aspects of music listening to the general public in a digestible package. Spotify also cornered the market on podcasting and has become the most popular podcasting platform for content creators.
Like every large corporation which has such a strong hold over the general public, Spotify’s grip on the music and podcasting world necessarily consolidates power over its users. This has broad free speech implications as well as questions surrounding music “ownership” and access to music and entertainment.
Censorship via Content Policies
Spotify has received criticism over the years for various controversies regarding its inconsistent application of its content policy in regards to removing material from the platform, particularly its Hate Content and Hateful Content Policy. Two high-profile examples include the removal of R. Kelly’s music and Joe Rogan’s podcast from Spotify.
Both these figures received backlash from the general public as a result of their personal controversies – in the case of R. Kelly, long-term accusations of sexual misconduct, and in the case of Joe Rogan, the use of the “n” word in previous podcasts and interviews throughout his career. Wielding its oft-criticized “hate content” and privacy policies, Spotify removed both Kelly’s and Rogan’s content from its database for at least a brief period. While neither man necessarily deserve sympathy for their removal from the platform, the practice of Spotify essentially exercising its own discretion in removing their content speaks to the inconsistency of Spotify’s privacy policies as well as the power that consumers have handed to companies like Spotify to curate what music, entertainment, and learning looks like in the digital age. Removing an artist from a platform as ubiquitous as Spotify is tantamount to censorship, and it is difficult to determine what Spotify’s role should be in policing the content on its platform. At the time of removal from Spotify’s playlists, neither Kelly nor Rogan were convicted of any crime, while Spotify continued to host the art and content of convicted criminals and other controversial figures. This sort of selective enforcement of privacy and content policies is typical of tech giants like Google and Meta, who fashion broad provisions into their legal documents and wield that power to control what content can exist on platforms that have evolved into de-facto news outlets for the general public.
Data Collection and Surveillance | >
> | In an industry facing rampant piracy and accessibility issues, Spotify quickly became a dominant force in the music and podcasting market by combining convenient audio streaming, adaptive playlists, and social aspects of music listening into one easily digestible package. Despite its charms, Spotify’s powerful grip on the music and podcasting world has many problematic implications. The company has received backlash for its inconsistent application of its content and privacy policies as well as its poor compensation for artists and content creators on the platform. Perhaps most troubling is Spotify’s surveillance of its users’ listening habits, which allows the company to extract a detailed mental profile of every individual. Consumers may not always be worried about this issue, as many people enjoy Spotify’s adaptive playlists and dynamic ability to find music that matches their individual tastes. While many would gladly give up their valuable personal data in order to improve Spotify’s services, consumers should be wary of how this data can be used to surveil their everyday lives. | | | | |
<
< | The type of data that a music streaming company like Spotify collects on its users may not be as immediately alarming as the personal data that companies like Meta and Google collect on their user bases, but its ubiquity as a service for the general public has its own set of pitfalls. Spotify undoubtedly has access to information on every single song or podcast any of its users has listened to, when they played and paused each track, their particular tastes, and oftentimes, their mood or feelings when listening to any piece of media. Consumers may not always be worried about these developments, as people enjoy Spotify’s adaptive playlists and dynamic ability to find music that matches people’s individual tastes, and would gladly give their information in order to improve that service. However, consumers should be careful about how this data can be used to enhance and refine the tracking and surveillance capabilities of big tech companies. The dystopian possibilities of the company keeping careful tabs of your location and mood based on the playlists you listen to, targeting ads at you based on your emotional state are already somewhat of a reality: in 2021, Spotify got a patent approved that essentially allows them to suggest content based on emotional state, age, gender, and even accent. This information can be combined with voice recognition and geographic metadata to paint a disturbingly accurate picture of a person’s whereabouts, activities, and feelings at any particular time, a prospect as scary as any other social media app out there. | >
> | Potential Alternatives | | | | |
<
< | As a final point, the migration of all music listening and access to Spotify surely has ramifications on how people consume music in general. When Spotify goes down, millions across the world lose a crucial part of their everyday life and often have no access to their own collection of music. While Spotify’s ease of use and high-quality product have an undoubtable allure, it is worth it for consumers to consider what alternatives exist for accessing music and the value of the personal data being exchanged for the surface-level convenience of the music streaming platform. | >
> | The most straightforward solution to the Spotify “problem” is simply not to use it. Many alternatives to Spotify exist, though most services which approximate its algorithmic playlist and song suggestion features have many of the same privacy concerns. Any music listening service which presents new options based on one’s mood or previous listening history is bound to collect intrusive behavioral data to better instruct its algorithms. Functionally similar platforms like Apple Music, Amazon Music, or Pandora are likely comparably intrusive to Spotify. Services like Bandcamp and Soundcloud also host music and offer artists more flexibility in uploading and controlling content they put on the platforms, but are far from secure in their own right (on top of not having the same suite of features as Spotify). Music piracy has its own set of moral quandaries – Spotify’s business model works in large part as a streamlined, convenient, paid alternative to piracy that gives artists a slice of the profit (no matter how meager). On the other end of the spectrum, more primitive alternatives to discovering new music, such as traditional radio stations or simple word of mouth, cannot hope to approach the personalization and accuracy of Spotify-like systems. | | | | |
<
< |
What has voice recognition to do with it? | >
> | Thus, consumers in some ways have a binary choice between privacy and ultra-convenience in music listening. The technology exists to allow individuals to securely stream music and audio recordings of themselves and others without the ubiquitous monitoring of Spotify (for example, by using an NAS device or small personal server such as FreedomBox). Decentralized streaming platforms that use blockchain technology to mitigate issues like artist compensation are in their infancy, but such services would be necessarily more secure and transparent than the closed system of Spotify. Offline ownership of music, purchasing music directly from artists, or even piracy of music through secure, untraceable means are all superior options to Spotify in terms of privacy, but can also be thought of as a different experience altogether. There is a shared commonality between these options (namely, consumption of recorded audio), but Spotify affords its users precise algorithmic suggestions for future listening, subjective aesthetic and user interface advantages, and an amorphous social component to music listening that ostensibly private and “safer” options do not. | | | | |
<
< | The point of the essay is that a streaming service that has replaced both radio broadcasting and the personal library of recorded music and spoken word winds up with various kinds of power. Indeed, that's obvious and can be put in a sentence. The powers involved include broad surveillance of individuals' listening and therefore of their mental lives. This takes another sentence. | >
> | Individualized Solutions | | | | |
<
< | The remaining 900 words or so should be about what to do. Once again, that's obvious: everyone should have the ability to stream their own and others' personal collections of recordings to themselves, everywhere, securely, without monitoring. The technology is simple. All my music, spoken word recordings, and other forms of post-Edisonian culture are located on my own storage, served securely to me over the Net wherever I am, not monitored or analyzed by anybody. Anyone with a FreedomBox or other tiny personal server or NAS device can do the same. | >
> | To some, the price of this convenience – one’s personal data and privacy – is simply too high. To others, the trade-off is seemingly worth it. The ideal solution, then, is up to the individual and their valuation of their own data. Once informed of the dystopian levels of surveillance they are being subjected to, some individuals may reject such vehicles of social control in favor of private alternatives. On a global scale, this is difficult to envision, given that people have willingly relinquished even more of their valuable privacy rights to companies like Meta, Twitter, and Apple in exchange for services even more intrusive and obvious than Spotify’s. The hope is that, at least within the audio streaming realm, people will make conscious choices to choose music services which prioritize user privacy more than others, as well as push their governments to enact data privacy legislation and antitrust reform to reduce the power that giants like Spotify hold over the public and increase transparency. | | | | |
<
< | Given that technological certainty, what legal and political consequences flow from it? Given that you don't like the power of Spotify and could remove it from your life easily if you wanted to, why don't you? | >
> | On a surface level, Spotify users can also take steps to reduce the access Spotify has to their data. Using the advanced privacy settings within the app itself, users can block cookies, opt out of tailored ads, disconnect the service from social media apps and other unused services, and make other small changes to the way they use Spotify. Using privacy-focused Internet browsers which limit the use of third-party cookies and make it more difficult to track your data is another potential solution. | | | | |
<
< | | >
> | The utility of some of these changes is debatable, especially those which still involve using Spotify or similar applications. Ultimately, using Spotify or Spotify-esque platforms at all requires these systems to take in your personal data and feed it into their existing networks. While Spotify’s ease of use and high-quality product have an undoubtable allure, it is worth it for consumers to consider what alternatives exist for accessing music and the value of the personal data being exchanged for the surface-level convenience of the music streaming platform. | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
|