Spotify is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 515 million monthly active users, including 210 million paying subscribers, as of March 2023. Spotify is listed (through a Luxembourg City-domiciled holding company, Spotify Technology S.A.) on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts. Taken from Wikipedia.
Terms of Service, Privacy Policy
Back when I still had one I believe this was the only thing they needed.
Some report victory when signing up with an email alias while others say otherwise. To play it safe I'll consider both sides of the story this time.
Yes.
To determine the limit thingy on Premium, idk I never bought Premium.
Derived from your IP or payment currency. If the going gets rough they ask for your street address. No thank you!
To be fair, a lot of us want to share our music taste to the world.
The only one they name are Google Maps. Wtf.
Want a break from the ads?
Of course your music player would want to know what you bought at the local mall at exactly 8:43 PM Thursday, May 20, 2021.
They don't out right say analytics in their Policy, but they do say they analyze usage data which is pretty much the same. No opt out either, yikes.
Apparently the only exception to this would be if the law requires them to keep data.
Don't let the Github page fool you, you won't find the source code for the clients there. But you will find some open source projects they implement in the official client. Cool?
Tons on Github but never used em so no recommendations here, bub.
Too many people pay way too much for music these days.
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Analysis: I'm at least glad that Spotify didn't get a negative score like many of its contemporaries in the "essential apps in 202x" category. Although this may change once there's conclusive proof on Spotify working with email aliases. Regardless, Spotify is pretty bad for privacy. You may argue that you probably don't mind sharing your music taste with random strangers across the globe, but the service logs your location as well. And honestly that piece of information, whether limited to the country of residence or your exact coordinates, should not just be given away to anyone like candy on Halloween. They also share and get info to and from 3rd parties, which once again capitalizes on your online existence while you yourself gain nothing but your right to privacy being violated. Personally I've never touched music streaming services ever since falling in love with lossless audio, but I do occassionally dabble in 320kbps mp3 files. So if you just want to play music, downloading them for offline playback is usually more private assuming your music player doesn't contain trackers.