Do You Have to Have the Same Address for Spotify Family
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 likewise want to know where you alive or to obtain your location data. It'due south function of an attempt to detect fraud and abuse of its Premium Family program.
Premium Family is a $xv-a-month plan for up to six people. The only condition is that they all alive at the same address. Just the streaming music giant is concerned nearly people abusing that plan to pay as picayune as $2.50 for its services. So in August, the company updated its terms and conditions for Premium Family subscribers, requiring that they provide location data "from time to time" to ensure that customers are actually all in the same family.
Yous accept 30 days to abolish after the new terms went into effect, which depends on where you are. The family plan terms rolled out start on Aug. 19 in Ireland and on Sept. 5 in the Usa.
The company tested this last year and asked for verbal GPS coordinates simply ended the pilot program after customers balked, according to TechCrunch. At present information technology intends on rolling the location data requests out fully, reigniting privacy concerns and raising the question of how much is besides much when information technology comes to your personal information.
"The changes to the policy allow Spotify to arbitrarily use the location of an individual to ascertain if they continue to reside at the same address when using a family account, and it's unclear how often Spotify will query users' devices for this data," said Christopher Weatherhead, technology lead for United kingdom watchdog group 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 near your personal life. Even when the data is anonymized, location information is often then specific that it just takes a few steps to effigy out who the coordinates are linked to. In New York, lawmakers are because a bill banning apps from sharing people'southward location data within the city.
With 108 one thousand thousand subscribers, Spotify is the ascendant force in streaming music. Its closest competitor, Apple tree Music, has sixty 1000000 subscribers.
Spotify, whose premium service doesn't serve upwardly ads, maintains that it's simply using your location data for verification.
"This data is encrypted and can be edited past the plan owner every bit needed," the company said in a statement. "The location information that is collected during Premium Family account creation is only used by Spotify for that purpose."
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Once yous sign up for the family plan, Spotify will enquire those on the program to provide the company a dwelling house address using Google Maps. Every person added to the plan 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 home location information for advert and that it doesn't store the information for internal utilize.
"Once verification of a family member's dwelling house address is completed, we practise not store their location data or track their location at any fourth dimension," a Spotify spokesperson said.
But there are some flaws in this methodology. It overlooks families that aren't living together, whether it'due south considering kids are off to college or they have separated parents. It's also overlooking the privacy concerns with giving your location information abroad, experts said.
And this won't be a old scenario. The detect said that Spotify could ask for location data to check for fraud "from time to time" but didn't specify when or how frequently those checks would happen.
While Google has its own privacy concerns, privacy experts propose that it's meliorate to use the Google Maps option rather than turning on your real-time location data for Spotify.
"That does seem to entail giving up quite a chip of personal information," said April Doss, head of the cybersecurity and privacy law practice at Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr and the National Security Bureau's old associate general counsel for intelligence law. "Consequently, it's important that Spotify has created a less intrusive pick for users, with manual information entry to residence location rather than ongoing monitoring of the person's location."
A Google spokesman pointed to the Maps Platform'south privacy policy, which notes that clients like Spotify demand to have complete consent to use location data from customers.
The modify also brings upwardly privacy concerns for children who are on their parents' family unit plans. You lot take to be over thirteen years one-time to employ Spotify, merely the location data requirements still gear up 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 half-dozen:55 a.m. PT: Spotify has already begun its location data requests starting on Sept. 5 for customers in the US.
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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