Push notification every few seconds (about my friend's activity)

[martovcac22]

Plan

Premium

Device

Xiaomi Mi 10T pro

Operating System

Androdi 11

My Question or Issue

Hello,

I have updated my Spotify app earlier on today and ever since then I am getting extremely annoying Spotify push notifications (I also attached two screenshots):

"Your friend [name] is listeing to [device]. Tap to listen and control music together"

1. I have no friends on Spotify (nor do I have my Facebook or any other app connected, I only have my Google assistant connected) nor have I ever connected to anybody elses device but my own (headphones and a xiaomi speaker)

2. All of the social functions are disabled - Device broadcast status, Autoplay on this/other devices, everything is disabled.

3. I am living in a dorm and there are many devices that are showing up but I have never got a notifications like this every few seconds when using Spotify.

4. I really have no idea who those people are either.

5. I have cleared cashe, logged out, nothing helps

It's been going on for the entire day and it's extremely annoying. Firstly there were two users but now it's only one. I get push notification every few seconds, repeatedly and it's slowly driving me crazy.

Any help on how to stop this would be much appreciated. Thank in advance!

Martin

[Spoetasdelpueblotify]

No, i´m seance few years a go.

[Maifleur]

Group Sessions automatically assumes you are friends with people who share a WiFi network. I discovered this when two other people sharing a hotel with me started group sessions, sending me a notification: "Your friend Y wants to listen with you on Spotify."

There's a setting to disable getting the notification, but I think we need a secure setting that turns off Group Sessions.

[orientalsausage]

Wow, I just checked into the hotel I normally stay at and am getting notifications about what other guests are listening to!  I can join their playlist or even take over their speaker!  Whats going on Spotify?  This is embarrassing.  I see your investigating this.  Ill try the fix you have suggested...

[orientalsausage]

version 8.7.16.1354

[Spenceanator]

I just got this notification today from someone I have no clue who they were.  They started listening to a speaker with a name that so happened to be the same as one of mine. Though no sound was coming from my speaker. I verified there weren't unknown devices connected to my PRIVATE network.

This was an awful feature. And as a software engineer I'm appalled how incredibly insecure and how little thought went into releasing this. I did not want this. I've never wanted this. Leave me on my own little island. I hope you guys instead let people opt into these sort of things because I am very close to just canceling my subscription and instead using YouTube premium. Awful idea.

[Yordan]

Hi folks,

Thank you for your replies!

We've passed your feedback to our developers who have made some changes backstage, so this should be fixed by now and the notification should no longer pop up. Could you confirm that things look good on your end?

Keep us posted on this. Take care!

[rover1]

This does not seem to be fixed.  I am still getting a notification every few minutes about the listening activity of someone I do not know.  This happens when I am on the wifi at a college campus.  It's really annoying and it's also a significant privacy issue.

[edloewenthal]

Hey Guys,

this was fixed some weeks ago; the unsolicited notifications about "friends" listening went away. BUT..... now they are back! Please fix it again. 

To reiterate: This clearly happens on WiFi, and therefore none of the names are necessarily friends. It's a huge invasion of privacy to allow others to A) see that you're listening to music at all, and B) get involved in any way without ME INITIATING IT! Why would I EVER want everyone on my WiFi to know EVERY TIME I'm listening to music?????

[OscarDC]

Hey @edloewenthal,

Thank you for keeping in contact.

We appreciate your feedback and the troubleshooting steps you've done so far. Since it's been a few months since your previous message, would you mind sending us the Spotify version you're currently running?

Also, could you include in your next response the make, model and OS version of the device that is having this issue? 

Lastly, it would be great if you could attach a screenshot where we can see the notification you've mentioned. This will give us a better look at the issue to keep investigating.

We'll be on the lookout. 

[edloewenthal]

Yo.

I'm using Spotify version 8.7.32.1554

I'm on a Samsung Galaxy s20 5G using Android 12 OS.

I can assure you that it doesn't matter so much about the device, everyone I know is having this problem on their phones,  Google pixels,  Etc.

I've never had it on a desktop though.

Can't you just make the feature an option, like downloading over Wi-Fi versus data? Can't be that hard.

Anyway thanks a lot for getting back to me, it's nice to know that someone is at least seeing these messages and trying to do something about it. That is certainly appreciated.

Best, Ed

[Alex]

Hey there @edloewenthal,

Thanks for the info.

We've passed this on to the team investigating the issue 🙂

We'll keep you updated here when we have more news.

Cheers.

[elkajgkjeag]

I am also getting pop ups when I open spotify saying that xxx is listening on xxx with a button to join session. 

I work in a large office and am very irritated to see this every single day. 

I am on a Galaxy S20 5G running android 12. spotify version is 8.7.34.1317

[AndresM]

Hey @elkajgkjeag,

Thanks for reaching out about this in the Community and welcome. 

We've passed the info you sent to the right team (who are investigating this issue).

Remember that any update will be posted on this thread.

[ISA345]

It seems as if Spotify has this issue since 2017. Today I discovered for myself  that in my Hotel Wifi I could manipulate the playlist of someone else connected to the Wifi. After searching for this issue and noticing unreplied issue requests from 2017 and 2018, I canceled my subscription today.

[Qazws]

I've just had this issue on a public wifi network (public transport). I got 2 notifications - only got a screenshot for one of them. Version 8.7.44.968 (the latest available for Android).

[smitjz]

When will this issue be fixed? Staying in a hotel and getting asked to join sessions with other random guests....

[Jeremy]

Hi there folks,

Thank you for your patience!

Can you let us know if you still have this issue? Make sure that you're running the latest version of the app.

We'll be on the lookout for your replies 🙂 

[edloewenthal]

Hi, this was still happening on August 23rd. That's yesterday. So no it has not been fixed.
Version 8.7.58.463

[Leviathan]

Still happening. 
I get notifications at work where many devices are active. It's very annoying and far from private.

[OscarDC]

Hey folks,

Thank you for your patience regarding this behavior.

We've received some news from the team in charge of the investigation. After some backstage research, we can confirm that the pop-up will not be shown if there is more than one session currently active on the Wi-Fi network.

This means that if you access a public network and there's more than one session of Spotify active, you'll not receive the pop-up asking to join that session. However, if there's only one session active over that network, the system will still show the pop up to join it as an expected behavior.

Hope this clarifies things a bit. If you have any additional questions, don't hesitate to ask.