Spotify is facing a privacy controversy as users allege that their private playlists were made public without their consent. This situation, similar to a previous issue, has raised concerns about an ongoing privacy problem. Users took to Twitter and Spotify’s community forums to report the unexpected change, with one user calling it an “absolutely unacceptable privacy violation.”
The playlists aren’t actually public they just added a third, ambiguous category with some updates they made: “Recently Spotify has made some changes to playlist Privacy adding and extra level of privacy control. So all playlists that were previously Private are now Not added to profile, as the wording goes. This is why you see the option to Make Private on every playlist. Which means that your playlists were not made Public, they just appear to be categorized differently, so those playlists are still not visible for anyone who views your profile on any platform.”
There’s a fundamental problem in modern people mindset: too much trust that everything will stay as it is now forever.
The only valid internet rule is: everything one puts on the internet can become publicly available and linked to one’s identity (name and surname) at any point in the future
It’s a tragedy that this mindset has become much less common over the past 10 years
The flipside of the same coin is that few people expect the sites and apps we use to respect our privacy at all anymore.
For example, pre-9/11 Google’s whole schtick was that they would never share or sell our data. At the time, a lot (though not enough) of people were outraged by their backtracking on this. Now, corporations have learned that we’re all numb to this. I’ve even had people lecture me about not “supporting a site” by viewing ads or sharing my real data on my account.
I’ve been guilty of this too, because we become numb to it. I’ve tried to switch to more privacy-respecting options, but I’ve still gotta use google services at work, still have too many friends on discord just to leave, etc.