“Spotify is beginning to read your context-your location, the time of day, and more-to make deeply educated guesses about what you might want to listen to. Location: Spotify recently introduced a feature that generates a playlist to match your running pace for that to work, it needs to know where you are and how fast you’re moving.īeyond that, though, Spotify has been very public about its desire to provide context-aware playlists and songs. Those songs are stored as media files, which the apps then need permission to read. Media files: Many music streaming apps let you download playlists to your phone to listen to those songs offline. Though it wasn't clear in the first wording of its privacy update, Spotify has now said it will ask you for permission to access your photos when and if you want to upload a photo.

As Spotify CEO Daniel Ek pointed out on Twitter last night, access to your photos would be a convenient way for the app to let you customize header art on a playlist, or upload a new profile picture. Photos: It’s uncomfortable to think of a music app combing through your photo library, but think again of the social element.

Access to your contacts would let you find friends on Spotify through their email addresses or phone numbers, exactly how Instagram, Twitter, or any other social network currently does. Currently, Spotify taps into your social media profiles (if you let it) to help enable those connections.

Increasingly, though, apps like Spotify think of themselves as mini social networks, a way to share artists and songs among friends. Let’s break this down a little further, since these are big categories that contain a few different implications.Ĭontacts: If you think of or use a streaming-music app as literally just a collection of playlists, you’re right to be annoyed that it wants access to your address book.

It’s worth taking a step back, though, and considering both why those permissions exist, and what you can do to get around them. So most music-streaming services ask for similar information, some of which sounds pretty invasive.

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