Spotify How to Download Your Personal Data
Spotify tracks and stores customers’ personal data. Consumers are becoming more aware of how much data is collected about them from the services they use. Google tracks location data using its apps as well as capturing voice recordings. Facebook was the first to come to light with data privacy issues courtesy of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That was followed by missing inbox messages, misreported metrics, and a data hack.
Spotify also tracks and stores data from its users – both free and paid subscribers are subject to data collection. This is spelled out in Spotify privacy policy. The data tracking includes users’ playlists, 90 days of streaming history and searches, a list of what’s saved in your Spotify library, the number of followers, the names of the Spotify users, artists you follow, as well as your payment and subscription data
Spotify users have the ability to restrict or withdraw consent to certain types of personal data being processed. Obviously, credit card data must be processed for paid subscribers. Users who log in with their Facebook profiles are sharing data between the two apps. I do not log in with mu Facebook profile but still the Facebook data sharing was enabled on my Spotify account. How that data sharing goes on is a blog post for another day.
How to Download Your Privacy Data from Spotify
- Select Profile in the upper left corner of the screen
- Select account from the dropdown menu
- Select Privacy settings from the left-hand menu
- Scroll down to the Download your data section
- Select Request
- Spotify will begin the request to download your personal data that it saves
Note: Users can only request their data via the desktop version of Spotify
I requested my Spotify data download on September 22, 2018. It was not available to down load until October 15th. Once Spotify notifies you that the data file is available to download for the next 14 days. Retrieve your Spotify data file within that timeframe or else you will have to request it again.
Phew! Talk about pokey! Was there a rush on requested data? Or is this just something they don’t do very often? The zipped file was only 27 kB. The zip vile contained eight json files which are simple text files. They are not formatted for easy reading, but they are certainly easy to enough to understand. The only personally concerning information in the file named “userdata” was my birthdate which is fake. lol).
My search queries are stored in a file aptly name “searchqueries” one entry looked like this
{
“date” : “2018-09-23”,
“platform” : “ANDROID”,
“country” : “US”,
“terminationReason” : “LEAVE”,
“msDuration” : 143,
“typedQuery” : null,
“selectedQuery” : null,
“userIntent” : “nav-back-hardware-back-button”,
“viewUri” : “spotify:search”
}
It is a little creepy since my device type and country are stored, but data wise this is not too bad. My mobile number was blank even though I do have the mobile app.
Also, in the request a download section of the Spotify user Privacy settings are two sliders that allow a user to shut off the connection to Facebook and personalized-third party ads. This tells me that there is probably more data stored about users than is given in the data download , I suspect that there is at least more user data on hours of use, typical times of days, and user behavior data that are useful to marketers.
Michelle writes about cyber security, data privacy focusing on social media privacy as well as how to protect your IoT devices. She has worked in internet technology for over 20 years and owns METRONY, LLC. Michelle earned a B.S. in Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Michelle published a guide to Cyber Security for Business Travelers
