Many of these personalization features are likely to involve systems that recommend new music and playlists to you.īut there’s also Spotify’s advertising business-something that’s increasingly linked to its burgeoning podcast empire. Its privacy policy says it can use your data for personalization, troubleshooting, developing new features and technology, marketing and advertising, research, and for other legal reasons. It's this behavioral data that helps Spotify go big on personalization. Other “technical service partners” provide Spotify with data that puts IP addresses onto maps to know what city and state you’re in. If you log in with Facebook, for instance, it can “import your information” from there, including a Facebook user ID.

Spotify can get extra information about you from other companies and services. If you use its “Hey Spotify” voice controls, then it can also access these recordings. It can also get “motion-generated or orientation-generated mobile sensor data” from your device’s accelerometer or gyroscope. The company’s privacy policy also says it can get cookie data, IP addresses, the type of device you’re using, your browser type, your operating system, and information about some devices on your Wi-Fi network. If you pay, you’ll also give it your billing information. You can tell it your username, email, phone number, date of birth, gender, street address, and country. “They can be more concise, they can lay it out better.”īroadly, the rest of the data Spotify has about you is information you give it when you’re creating an account. “I think they can use much clearer language,” says Pat Walshe, a data protection and privacy consultant who has researched Spotify’s use of data.

If you really want to know what Spotify knows about you, then you need to read its privacy policy, which runs to 4,500 words. But that’s not the only data Spotify gets.

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