Forbes has an article looking at some changes to streaming music service Spotify’s privacy policy that seem rather alarming. Spotify wants to collect information that shows things like your phone’s GPS location and the speed of your movements, so it can tell if you’re “running, walking, or in transit.” It also wants permission to collect other information from your device, “such as contacts, photos, or media files.”

Other provisions include the ability to collect voice commands if users give permission, and to track your search queries by date and time, rather than just what you asked for. It may also receive information about you from “service providers and partners,” and may share information with advertising partners in a “de-identified” format that doesn’t personally identify you.

This seems concerning from a privacy standpoint, but this kind of thing always does. The thing about these corporate privacy policies is that they tend to give you very little information, and as a result they come off sounding rather ominous.

A statement from Spotify says that the data “simply helps us to tailor improved experiences to our users, and build new and personalised products for the future.” And that’s certainly possible—even probable. For example, Spotify has a feature called “Spotify Running” that matches the beats-per-minute of the songs you hear to your running pace to help keep you on stride.

Maybe it has good reasons for wanting to collect other types of information, too.  Maybe it just wants to cover all bases if it decides it wants to, say, give you a slideshow of your photos to the music you play or something. Who knows?

But it does seem a little questionable to be asking for that information from everyone, regardless of whether they might actually want to use such features. I suppose it’s simpler to have a one-size-fits-all policy rather than to have a different privacy policy for each function you might use, or else it wants to build up data on you before you actually start using the feature.

It’s funny to consider that all this is for a service that just plays you music. You didn’t have to worry about privacy when you were listening to your Walkman, or even your original iPod, unless you had your music turned up too loud. I suppose we should be grateful that e-book readers aren’t trying to innovate new services that want to collect more information about us. What sorts of things might they try to do if they could? Pop up relevant books based on your GPS location?

Regardless, it’s good to know of these changes, given how often most of us just blindly click through such notices to get to the service we want to use. We should probably all start thinking about this kind of thing more often.

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