How Does Spotify Family Know if We're All at the Same Address
Spotify will be requesting location data for Premium Family subscribers.
Angela Lang/CNETSpotify knows a lot about its users -- their musical tastes, their most listened-to artists and their summer anthems. Spotify will also desire to know where you alive or to obtain your location data. It'due south part of an effort to detect fraud and abuse of its Premium Family programme.
Premium Family unit is a $xv-a-month plan for up to half dozen people. The only condition is that they all live at the same address. But the streaming music giant is concerned most people abusing that plan to pay as footling equally $ii.50 for its services. Then in August, the visitor updated its terms and conditions for Premium Family unit subscribers, requiring that they provide location data "from time to time" to ensure that customers are actually all in the same family.
You have thirty days to cancel after the new terms went into effect, which depends on where yous are. The family program terms rolled out showtime on Aug. nineteen in Ireland and on Sept. v in the The states.
The company tested this last year and asked for exact GPS coordinates but ended the pilot program afterwards customers balked, according to TechCrunch. Now it intends on rolling the location data requests out fully, reigniting privacy concerns and raising the question of how much is also much when it comes to your personal information.
"The changes to the policy allow Spotify to arbitrarily utilise the location of an private to define if they go along to reside at the same address when using a family business relationship, and information technology'southward unclear how oftentimes Spotify will query users' devices for this information," said Christopher Weatherhead, technology lead for U.k. watchdog grouping Privacy International, adding that there are "worrying privacy implications."
Location data is specially sensitive, as information technology hands out information on where you've been, giving companies and advertisers details about your personal life. Even when the data is anonymized, location information is often so specific that it only takes a few steps to figure out who the coordinates are linked to. In New York, lawmakers are because a bill banning apps from sharing people'due south location data within the city.
With 108 million subscribers, Spotify is the dominant force in streaming music. Its closest competitor, Apple Music, has sixty million subscribers.
Spotify, whose premium service doesn't serve up ads, maintains that information technology's only using your location data for verification.
"This data is encrypted and can exist edited past the program owner every bit needed," the visitor said in a statement. "The location data that is nerveless during Premium Family account creation is simply used by Spotify for that purpose."
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Once you sign up for the family unit plan, Spotify will ask those on the plan to provide the company a home accost using Google Maps. Every person added to the program will have to do the same, or enable location services for Spotify on their devices, the visitor said. Spotify said it doesn't use that dwelling house location information for advertising and that it doesn't shop the data for internal apply.
"Once verification of a family member'south abode accost is completed, we practice not store their location data or track their location at any time," a Spotify spokesperson said.
But there are some flaws in this methodology. It overlooks families that aren't living together, whether it's because kids are off to college or they take separated parents. Information technology'south likewise overlooking the privacy concerns with giving your location data abroad, experts said.
And this won't be a 1-time scenario. The notice said that Spotify could inquire for location information to bank check for fraud "from fourth dimension to fourth dimension" simply didn't specify when or how often those checks would happen.
While Google has its own privacy concerns, privacy experts suggest that information technology's ameliorate to utilize the Google Maps choice rather than turning on your real-time location data for Spotify.
"That does seem to entail giving up quite a bit of personal information," said Apr Doss, caput of the cybersecurity and privacy police practise at Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr and the National Security Agency'due south former associate general counsel for intelligence law. "Consequently, it's important that Spotify has created a less intrusive option for users, with transmission data entry to residence location rather than ongoing monitoring of the person's location."
A Google spokesman pointed to the Maps Platform'southward privacy policy, which notes that clients like Spotify need to have complete consent to use location information from customers.
The modify also brings up privacy concerns for children who are on their parents' family unit plans. You have to be over 13 years old to apply Spotify, but the location data requirements still set off alarms for privacy experts.
"It seems excessive to permanently rails individuals for this purpose," Weatherhead said. "Additionally, it poses the problem of Spotify inadvertently tracking children and minors, who aren't legally able to consent or object."
Correction, Sept. 12 at 6:55 a.g. PT: Spotify has already begun its location data requests starting on Sept. 5 for customers in the Us.
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Source: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/spotify-wants-to-know-where-you-live-and-will-be-checking-in/
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