Privacy modes should default to their highest setting for every social network, especially those broadcasting real-time activity. In what twisted universe do most people want their friends to know what music they’re playing? While the social aspect of Spotify is fun, the assumption that most people want to broadcast every song they take in is strange. I tend to think of listening to music as a passive, private activity. But with something like Spotify, where people simply consume content rather than create it, it’s plain weird.
With a platform like Twitter, that default makes sense, as it’s a microblogging platform designed to help people get their words amplified. By having people opt out of public posting rather than opt into it, these social platforms acclimate users to the idea that choosing to share is simply more convenient. Twitter’s default is public, Facebook’s default for updates is public, and while Instagram allows for locked accounts, it doesn’t allow people to change privacy settings on a post-by-post basis, which fosters an all-or-nothing approach to privacy. This is not unique to Spotify most major social networks push people to engage with their platforms in the most public-facing ways possible. To access it, you must click on settings, then go to the social tab, and then switch the session to private.Īll of this is designed to condition people to accept the public mode as Spotify’s normal setting. But you still need to know where to look, and Spotify is more frequently used on phones and tablets than on desktop, so that’s a secondary use case.) On the mobile app, the toggle is not on the home screen. (Toggling it on the desktop app is straightforward, since “Private Session” is the first option on the drop-down menu next to your account name. It’s not obvious on mobile or desktop that using Spotify on its default mode means broadcasting those habits to the world. What had seemed like an intensely dorky private moment between me and the open road had, in fact, been broadcast to a large swath of my social network. I thought back to the car ride I’d taken alone this winter, where the only antidote to the dreary landscape had been a marathon Les Misérables sing-along.
The same post-Alanis pit in my stomach tightened as I realized the implications of these tweets. Then I saw this exchange on Twitter between my colleague Hannah Giorgis and my internet acquaintance Monica Heisey:
I marveled at their boldness and was glad that nobody could see my objectively humiliating taste in music. I’d seen my friends’ music pop up on the Spotify desktop sidebar before, but I assumed they had opted into a social feature.
It was only this month that I discovered something apparently universally understood by my fellow Spotify listeners - that one must manually turn on “Private Mode” during each session to prevent others from seeing your musical choices. My tardiness regarding music knowledge hasn’t improved with time. In her defense, Jagged Little Pill had been out for well over a year. It was wry, it was jangly, it was Alanis Morissette’s “Hand in My Pocket.” I tapped a classmate on the shoulder at the end of the performance and whispered, “What song was that?” She looked at me with the most contempt a 9-year-old can muster for another child - truly withering, and etched into my memory with the deep specificity of early mortification - and said, “It’s Alanis Morissette, you idiot.” Barnabas as a classmate lip-synced to the best song I’d ever heard. Right at that grade-school age when the music you like starts mattering a great deal, I sat cross-legged and rapt in the talent show audience at St.
0 kommentar(er)
