Private playlists set to public

[KiwiPop]

Plan

Premium (Family)

Country

United States

Device

Galaxy s21 and desktop

Operating System

windows 10 and Android v12

My Question or Issue

Recently all my playlists that were previously made private were shown to be made public on my account. I've set my account to not make new playlists automatically public but it seems to do so anyways. I've been unable to find a fix as restarting my device and reinstalling the app does nothing and it is happening on both devices I use. Both devices along with the spotify app are up to date.

[Jeremy]

Hi there @KiwiPop,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community about this. We'd like to have a closer look into this.

Can you confirm that you followed the steps bellow:

1. In the desktop app, click t the top and select Settings.
2. Under Social, switch off Make my new playlists public.

If you did that and it didn't work, can you perform a clean reinstall of the app and then redo the setting as this will make sure there's no old cache files causing this.

We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

Take care!

[KiwiPop]

My option for "Make new playlists public" is already off. I have also done an entire clean reinstall and the issue still persists.

[Alex]

Hey @KiwiPop,

Thanks for the reply and the info you've submitted.

I'll do my best to clarify what's happening. When a new playlist is created on Spotify it's always set to Public by default. This means that if you link to the playlist, anyone can access it and listen to it. This doesn't mean that the playlist will be on your Profile when someone else searches for you in the app. This is why when you right-click you see the two options "Add to Profile" and "Make Private". So the setting "Make my new playlists public" basically means that new playlists will be added to your profile if switched on.

"Add to Profile" means that other users will be able to see the playlist when they open your profile. The playlist needs to be Public for this to be possible.

"Make Private" means that the playlist won't be shown on your profile and won't be accessible by anyone. If you send a link to the playlist to one of your friends, they'll be able to open the playlist and you'll see their profile accessing the playlist. You can remove any unwanted listeners. Note that the link to a Private playlist expires it will become unplayable after some time.

We've received reports from other users that this wording is confusing and we get where you're coming from. We've passed this feedback on to the development team and hopefully it will be made more clear in the future 🙂

Hope this clears things up. Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have questions.

[KiwiPop]

ah, that makes sense. Thank you.
do you guys plan to ever add an option to make playlists automatically private in the future or will it just be a change in wording when it comes to the "make new playlists public" option?

[Alex]

Hey @KiwiPop,

Thanks for the reply.

We can't say for sure what the future plan for development is and how the Playlist Privacy will be handled, but rest assured we've passed on this feedback about how confusing the current wording and functionality is to the right folks at Spotify.

For now we don't have any official news if there will be an option to make new playlists Private by default. The developer teams are constantly working on making the user experience better and a lot of us have requested such an option over the years.

You can check the Newsroom site from time to time to stay ahead of any developments or the introduction of new features  🙂

Cheers.