[Privacy] Private Session should stay active

[jakenfinn]

Let's face it. We've all used Spotify to listen to music that we would be embarassed to advertise publically.

Whether it's kittens meowing Christmas songs, that your friends would never let you live down, or a hardcore rap album, that you wouldn't want your 8 year old cousin to go and listen to because his cool aunt or uncle likes it.

When it comes to this social music app, privacy is not a convenient bonus feature, it's a critical necessity.

Currently, the only way to listen to songs privately on Spotify, is to go to the settings and activate a private session. This is not only annoying, since I constantly have to navigate through settings to activate privacy on my phone, it's stressful because you have to worry about whether or not certain people can see what you're listening too. My primary music app should not cause anxiety about what I share publically.

From a 2011 blog post "Spotify is all about sharing and discovering new music. It’s entirely up to you what you decide to share and what you keep private."

With the first part in mind, it makes sense that spotify would default to making all of the music you listen to public to your followers but the second part is not true. Anyone can follow me on Spotify and if I have to continuously activate a private session, there will inevitably be times when I forget. As a paying customer, I should have the ability to hide what I listen to if I please and activate privacy indefinitely.

[needforname]

I agree, it’s ridiculous that there’s no way to set private browsing as the default. Even though we have a family plan, there are times when my wife will play songs from my account, or really cheesy tunes are played for my niece when private listening is not enabled. Since friends have often looked to me for music suggestions, I’m sure when they see a bunch of awful tracks visible as my recently played, they assume I went soft or weird and never view my public playlists again.

I know when I see friends listening to music I consider as awful, I judge their taste and am not interested in checking out their playlists. Even though their recent listens may be for their niece or wife. If anything, Spotify is hindering music sharing by refusing to change this incredibly annoying feature. Spotify on Roku doesn’t even allow enabling private listening (it’s also greyed out on my phone when playing through Roku). There are so many bizarre oversights like this it makes me really want to switch services. For example, not having the ability to add a song to multiple playlists at once, no way to see what playlists a song is already in, no artist bio on iPhone, no duplicate track warning for songs on multiple albums, no way to quickly see and update tracks that have remastered versions on other albums.

Such blatant time wasting, annoying oversights with such simple solutions; yet Spotify refuses to implement them. It’s as if the developers & decision makers don’t even use their own product; because if they did they’d also realize how much better they could make it.

[needforname]

I meant to write “private listening”, not “private browsing” in my comment from a minute ago. Yet oddly there is no way to edit that comment, so I’m having to clutter up this comments section with another comment, just to point out a mistake.

Also annoying was how while I was in the process of writing my initial comment, a pop up appeared asking if I wanted to leave feedback. First off, why not display this after a comment has been submitted? Not only that, after I chose between the required “yes” or “no” on the intrusive feedback request pop-up, it didn’t even revert me back to where I had began commenting originally, but instead took me elsewhere on the page and my active comment nowhere to be seen. It was only after I clicked on “comment” again that I was able to see what I had begin writing.

I’m curious how such blatant oversights and bizarre UI behaviors are even a thing with companies like Spotify. They’re certainly not lacking the funds to perform customer research, product audits, and address problems. Heck, all you have to do to witness these annoyances is to use the app and attempt to comment in this forum. I could think of a dozen things to improve Spotify’s customer relations; through the app, this forum and the overall treatment of users. But what do I know. 

[Tjocksmurf]

Not surprising that Spotify disrespects privacy and deliberately enables abuse. 

[Tjocksmurf]

As always, the community is asking for something and Spotify is ignoring it. Despicable company

[Hystercia]

The most infuriating thing by far is having to scroll through settings on the Android app to find the private session toggle. It should be easily accessible like in other apps and internet browsers, with clear indication that it is on, again, like how other apps do. Most of the time I miss it while scrolling quickly through the settings before I need to sleep or focus on something, which only causes more frustration. 

[BCspot]

HIGH TIME YOU RECONSIDER THIS UX DARK PATTERN to get information from users. 
☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎☹︎
Three reasons this multi regularly get closer to taking my family of 6 off of spotify:
1)  The stupid lack of privacy is the default and if you turn it on it's regularly revoked from you. Integrity and care for customer and customer rights is in the tank.
2) Super hard to get your account decoupled from facebook. Tried this multiple times over the years and still haven't figured it out. Evil.
3) I miss truly owning my music

[needforname]

It sure would be nice if Spotify actually listened to its customers, or at minimum implemented obvious features such as an option to keep private listening enabled. Why do I want my friends being able to see which podcasts I’m listening to? Some episodes are medical related and quite personal. Why should users be required to remember to set their listening to private every time they open Spotify?

And since the private setting sometimes becomes disabled automatically after a certain period of time, I never know exactly when I need to double check to see if private listening is enabled. It’s a pointless and ridiculous requirement. 

There are many other moronic oversights and annoyances that thousands of users have complained about for years, yet because the user upvotes are sometimes spread over multiple different feature request posts, they don’t garner enough attention. And when they do, they are met with non sensible canned replies from reps and mentions that “the developers are aware of this” or “not all features can be implemented”, etc.

One such desperately needed feature is the option to add a track to multiple playlists at once. The current method of having to manually add a track to each of many playlists one at a time is incredibly tedious and time wasting. The solution is incredibly simple as well (just display all playlists at once with a checkbox next to each that can be selected). 

Also, the fact there’s no way to see if a track has already been saved to a playlist(s) is another head scratcher. Also, some bands have the same song on multiple albums (ex: greatest hits, compilations, remastered, etc).

Why isn’t there a way to be notified if a particular song from another album has already been liked or saved to a playlist? This would avoid duplicate songs from being saved. Also, for songs that contain a remastered version in a later album, why not offer users a way to automatically replace all songs they have Liked and/or saved in playlists, with the remastered version of those songs? I can’t imagine any reason why anyone wouldn’t want the higher quality recording of songs, since the song itself is exactly the same, but just better sounding.

And why on earth is there no artist bio/info (at least I can’t find any on my iPhone)? I thought there use to be. Regardless, I can’t imagine a single user not wanting to learn more about the bands they listen to (without having to search elsewhere). The best part about buying a CD growing up (other than the music of course), was the ability to view the album artwork and read the insert booklet. If Spotify is too cheap to write bios themselves, then allow bands to write their own, or have the bios auto fed from one of the many music sites on the web.

I could go on and on with a dozen other features that would greatly improve the user experience. It’s bizarre as to why these feature requests continue to be overlooked and why Spotify continues to provide no reasoning as to why, other than “only top ranked feature requests are pursued”. I can understand that, but the features I mentioned should be default without question. Why is it year after year none are implemented? Here’s an idea… run a poll for all feature requests, and the ones that receive over 80% or whatever, become implemented (unless Spotify can argue against their validity). 

[Yordan]

Updated on 2023-03-30

Hey everyone,

It seems that this idea ended up in the wrong board accidentally, so we're bringing it back.

We're keeping the previous Not Right Now status, as we don't have any immediate plans to implement this. As soon as we have any new information to share, rest assured we'll check back in here.

Take care.

[Johanna18]

Hi,

I don't want my followers to see what I am listening to. Music, podcasts, books, stories can be very personal. For paying customers there should be the option that the Spotify session is generally private. There could be a pop up that asks, whether you want to change back into public but it shouldn't happen without notice. 

Thanks for taking my feedback into consideration. 

Johanna