Spotify’s Pre-save option gives listeners and users the ability to add a song or album to your saved music or playlist before it is released. According to a Billboard article, this action gives the record label more permissions through user agreement than it lets on. For a user’s first pre-save they are required to agree to terms and conditions that gives the label more permissions than the streaming service usually provides them, giving them access “enough to track what the [users] listen to, change what artists they follow and potentially even control their music streaming remotely.”
According to media analysts the only permission required to be able to pre-save songs onto a user’s library is to “add and remove items in your Library,” yet, labels like Sony ask for an additional 16 other permissions to gain user information from their type of Spotify subscription to even the users birthdate.
In an age where users have been more aware of tech companies saving and storing information, most companies such as Google and Facebook have become more open about their reasoning towards it as well as now updating their Terms and Conditions to make it more clear to those users what type of permissions they are accepting and what information they are storing, using and selling.
I feel as if the permissions Spotify has allowed labels access to are excessive. Since many people will not read further into a drop-down menu to explicitly read every permission they are accepting, they are therefore unaware of how much privacy they are truly giving away. Although each label has a different list of agreements, Sony having one of the longest, it seems as if they are taking advantage of the Terms and Conditions and users lack of interest to be able to store and sell their information, possibly even change their profile and settings without their knowledge. I believe it is reducing their privacy in an age where we already lack laws to keep our identity and information safe through technology.
Written by Shannon Devine
Picture by John Tomac
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