Spotify Wants To Go Through Your Phone

[HardOCP News]

Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek released a statement today clarifying the company's new privacy policy and terms and conditions. Apparently the paragraph below was freaking people out:

“With your permission, we may collect information stored on your mobile device, such as contacts, photos, or media files. Local law may require that you seek the consent of your contacts to provide their personal information to Spotify, which may use that information for the purposes specified in this Privacy Policy.”

 

[codeflux]

I can't do squat about Spotify's new privacy policy.

Very true. But I can delete Spotify from my phone. Aaaand it's gone.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I'm actually impressed with their pricacy policy.

Why? because "with your permission" is in there. Most services don't ask, they just take, and you'd only know by going through the fine print on page 67 of the privacy policy.

And I believe this story was meant to link this article, not the one that was actually linked, in which the new policy is further detailed, including that Spotify will explicitly ask permission before accessing any of the things in the privacy policy (just like the privacy policy says they will)

Well, this was a tempest in a teapot, wasn't it.

 

[Spidey329]

I'm assuming this is for the social features within the app.

Media files would be for scanning your local library for inclusion into your Spotify library.

Not sure why they'd want access to photos.

 

[david_]

With permission? Is permission implied by using it? Where is the setting..

 

[Spidey329]

With permission? Is permission implied by using it? Where is the setting..

I can't remember if it's in Android 5.0/5.1, but I know Android M will allow you to suspend/revoke individual permissions per app. So you could deny it access to contacts and media files. Question is, would it still operate?

 

[Ocellaris]

With permission? Is permission implied by using it? Where is the setting..

This. They could have cleared this up by showing when and where the app asks for permission. But nope, just some "trust us this is good for you" or speak.

 

[Darrell262]

Funny, I just looked at my phone to see if I had spotify on it to delete it but I dont.

 

[BryanSTG]

I can't remember if it's in Android 5.0/5.1, but I know Android M will allow you to suspend/revoke individual permissions per app. So you could deny it access to contacts and media files. Question is, would it still operate?

Google will sabotage this with out a doubt, there is no way they will implement it propertly. XPrivacy, however, does this and works like a charm for me.

http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy

 

[sir-gold]

Google will sabotage this with out a doubt, there is no way they will implement it propertly. XPrivacy, however, does this and works like a charm for me.

http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy

This requires xposed framework, which requires your phone to be rooted, and running a version of android lower than 5.0.
Exposed framework for 5.0 is still in beta (with a nasty habit of bricking phones), and 5.1 isn't supported at all

 

[BryanSTG]

This requires xposed framework, which requires your phone to be rooted, and running a version of android lower than 5.0.
Exposed framework for 5.0 is still in beta (with a nasty habit of bricking phones), and 5.1 isn't supported at all

And yet it still works better than the one Google includes in 5.0 and 5.1