In what is shaping up to be a widespread privacy controversy, Spotify has come under scrutiny following allegations by users that the music streaming service made their private playlists public without their consent.
This situation is reminiscent of a similar issue flagged back in March, raising concerns over a possible pattern of an ongoing privacy issue.
The controversy began when users reported this unexpected change to Twitter and Spotify’s community forums.
“Apparently @SpotifyUSA silently made all of my private playlists public without my consent. The same happened to my wife too,” tweeted Microsoft Edge Project Manager William Devereux.
“That’s an absolutely unacceptable privacy violation. Anyone else noticed this happen recently? I haven’t changed any privacy settings.”
There are similar reports on Spotify’s forum in March, with one of the affected users being a music curator who uses Spotify professionally.
“I have revisited some lists made a month or so ago and they are all public now. Looking at more and they are now public as well!,” wrote the user on Spotify’s forums.
“Why has this happened? is there a way to make bulk lists private? I don’t want to spend days of my life changing them one by one, there are over 1400 lists and I cant invoice for that time so it will take away from may wages.”
Back in March, a user proposed a theory stating, “The actual settings of our playlists haven’t changed. What was formerly known as ‘private’ and ‘public’ playlists are now all called ‘public’, since they weren’t actually private previously, as they could be shared through a link.”
The theory further suggested a new level of truly private playlists that could not be accessed by others even with a link and only playlists marked as ‘on profile’ could be found via search or in the ‘Discovered on’ section on artist pages.
Despite the theory, Spotify users insist their recent experiences indicate a different issue. They affirm that their playlists were initially marked as private upon creation and were inexplicably made public without their knowledge or permission.
In response to the reports in March, a Spotify moderator stated, “Spotify doesn’t make such bulk changes and will not mess around with the settings of your collection/personal account unless you have requested this explicitly…”.
However, this has done little to alleviate users’ concerns, and it remains uncertain if the two issues are linked or entirely separate incidents.
We have reached out to Spotify about these reports but did not receive a reply at the time of this publishing