Spotify Might Begin Listening In On Your Conversations To Recommend You Music
Big Brother is here!
Increasingly, we live in an age in which tech companies value data about their users over just about everything else, so perhaps the news that music streaming giant Spotify has patented a technology that allows the app to “listen” to background noises in order to determine a wealth of data points about those using the service is unsurprising. Unsurprising, but not good.
Spotify actually filed the patent for the technology way back in 2018, when it was less clear just how far most big tech companies were going to go in order to find out things about their users. Because patents move slowly, it was only approved a matter of weeks ago, which is why the news is only just breaking.
Essentially, the technology would allow the app to monitor background speech from users. This speech can then be analysed to analyse accents, in order to understand geographic location, but also, rather more insidiously, mood, stress and intonation.
Spotify AI realizing you’re suicidal and immediately queueing thirty songs to make it worse https://t.co/xiqEEXmIgm
— april (@autogynefiles) January 28, 2021
In essence, that means that the app might be able to pick up your emotional state, and then use that state in order to curate you particular advertisements. In practice, it’s hard to tell what that would look like. Maybe, if you sounded a little blue, Spotify might advertise you sunny holidays, or dating apps?
More practically, the app would also be able to tell if you were alone or with a group of people, and then generate advertisements based on that.
None of this means necessarily that Spotify is committed to moving ahead with the technology. As 9To5 notes in their story about the patent, many companies will trademark patents that they never go ahead using.
But at the very least, it’s an interesting sign of the lengths that big companies will go to in order to “curate” user experiences — even if that requires what most of us would generously describe as “spying.”
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