Social networks are flooded these days with an explosion of colors, geometric shapes and posture. People share the screenshots that interest them most from Spotify Wrapped, the annual summary of consumption that the platform prepares for each user. streaming musical. The motivations are diverse: to feel unique, to show that our tastes are the most, to attract attention.
It must be recognized that what Spotify has achieved has a lot of merit. Its users proudly display some of the data that the company has extracted from their listening habits, giving them a tremendous marketing campaign for free. The phenomenon has implications from the point of view of privacy. Those who share their Wrapped not only know that Spotify collects and analyzes data about their life (number of hours and at what times of the day music is listened to, favorite bands and podcasts, preferred styles), but they also have no qualms about making it public. .
Would you do the same for the other information that Spotify stores but doesn’t show in the annual summary? The platform doesn’t just know the name, address or age of its acolytes. Musical tastes say a lot about people. More than it may seem. If you listen all day heavy metal but in the afternoon you prefer children’s songs, most likely we are dealing with a father or mother. If he streaming stops working at game time, it is possible that we have a football fan in front of us. If very rhythmic music is heard first thing in the morning or in the afternoon that breaks with habitual consumption, the subject may be a runner or athlete.
The company of Swedish origin does what in its privacy policy it qualifies as “inferences”: based on your music consumption patterns and preferred styles, the company’s data analysts and sociologists develop profiles with certain character traits. You can determine how likely a user is to be bold or shy, more or less sociable, or even left or right. He reaches these conclusions with convoluted statistical models based on correlations of widely varied data.
Spotify performs mathematical analysis of songs, examining rhythms, tempos, and melodies, and researches what values are associated with each available band or theme. It thus assigns a value to each song, which in turn gives rise to another value when combined with that of the songs included in user lists. All this information is crossed with the data collected about the user by the platform itself or by third parties, such as Facebook. An investigation of New York Times revealed in 2018 that Mark Zuckerberg’s social network shared sensitive user data with some 150 companies, including Spotify.
And why is he doing all this? Spotify, like so many other technology companies, analyze and order all this torrent of information from its users so that advertisers can show their advertising to an audience that matches what they sell. This is how the so-called segmented or targeted advertising works, the touchstone of the modern digital economy.
Spotify shares your data with Facebook by default, unless you tell it not to. It also uses information about your music consumption to serve you personalized advertising. This option can also be deactivated, although not completely: the platform will stop sharing “aggregated” data about you with advertisers, but you will continue to be shown ads “based on Spotify registration information and your usage data over time”. real”.
There is an indicator that serves to get an idea of the sophistication of the personal data analysis carried out by technological companies: the length of the terms and conditions of the service. The text that appears above that tab that we usually accept without reading each time we install an application. Spotify offers a document of 8,600 words, which is equivalent to about 35 minutes of reading. Twice as much as Facebook, Amazon or YouTube, three times more than Instagram or Netflix and well ahead of Twitter, LinkedIn or Tinder. It is only surpassed by Microsoft, which sets a record with 17,000 words and more than an hour of reading.
But the Spotify Wrapped rage raises another interesting question. Would those who share it on networks do the same with the annual summary prepared by other large platforms? Google has a lot of information about you. Once again, it uses it to serve you ads that may interest you. But it also knows where and who you were with last night, what kind of porn you like and if you really went on a business trip those days you were away. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, knows your salary range and if you vote for the right even if you pretend to be left.
The summary tabs could be very entertaining. They would serve to understand to what extent we are scrutinized in the digital age. And perhaps there would also be people willing to share them.
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