Spotify is currently facing a privacy controversy as users accuse the music streaming service of making their private playlists public without consent. This situation has raised concerns about a recurring pattern of privacy issues. It also brings to mind a similar problem that was highlighted in March. Users took to platforms like Twitter and Spotify’s community forums to report the unexpected change.
William Devereux, the Project Manager for Microsoft Edge, tweeted about the issue: ‘@SpotifyUSA silently made all of my private playlists public without my consent. The same happened to my wife as well. This privacy violation is absolutely unacceptable. Has anyone else noticed this recently? I haven’t made any changes to my privacy settings.’
In March, similar reports emerged on Spotify’s forum, including one from a music curator who utilizes Spotify professionally. The user posted on Spotify’s forums: ‘Lists I created a month or so ago are all public now. Upon further inspection, more of my lists have also become public! Why did this change occur? Is there a way to make multiple lists private at once? I can’t spend days altering them individually—there are over 1400 lists. This task won’t be compensated, so it’ll cut into my earnings.’
During that period, a user proposed a theory: ‘Playlist settings haven’t been altered. What used to be labeled as ‘private’ and ‘public’ playlists are now all termed ‘public.’ The reason being that those playlists weren’t truly private before since they could be shared through links.’
According to this theory, a new tier of genuinely private playlists might exist, inaccessible even through links. Playlists labeled ‘on profile’ could be located via search or in the ‘Discovered on’ section on artist pages.
Nevertheless, in contrast to this theory, Spotify users maintain that recent experiences point to a distinct issue. They assert that their playlists were initially designated as private upon creation but were inexplicably switched to public without their consent.
After the March reports, a Spotify moderator responded, saying, ‘Spotify doesn’t make broad changes like this and won’t alter your collection/personal account settings without explicit requests.
