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Spotify Messages can reveal your profile to anyone you've ever shared music with (www.androidauthority.com)

submitted 2 days ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/privacy@programming.dev

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A Reddit user Reeceeboii_ highlights, any time you share a song from within Spotify, it generates a unique tracking URL linked to your account. Spotify can join the dots between the sender and receiver whenever anyone clicks on this unique URL. People have allegedly noticed that Spotify has retroactively filled out the history of song shares in the Messages feature, which is possible through these tracking URLs.

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[–] golli@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago

Generally I think there are two questions: why does Spotify want messages and why would a user want them. The first one seems easy enough to answer: anything that binds a customer more closely to their product and creates switching costs in an otherwise relatively interchangeable product is good from a business perspective.

I could imagine some other use cases as well: Maybe it could be used to allow artists to engage their fans, inserting the platform deeper inbetween those two. I don't really know how merch and ticket sales are currently handled exactly, but a messaging system might also be useful to fully keep users within the app while using those features.