james fryer

I received an invite to Spotify a couple of months ago, but did not have the time to sign up until yesterday. I guess my timing was a little poor as yesterday Spotify changed their registration process and it now requires that you register using your facebook account. I didn’t like that too much, but I decided it wasn’t the end of the world. Not until I got further into the registration (after giving Spotify my facebook info) that I was asked to give Spotify permission to access my personal data on facebook and also allow Spotify to post to my facebook account. Now I don’t know what information they plan to to publish to my facebook account, but that isn’t something I’m comfortable with so I stopped the registration and uninstalled Spotify.

There is no other way to register with Spotify so I’d recommend, in the interest of keeping control over your own identity, to avoid Spotify. There are other options like last.fm.

In seeing that I was not alone in my aversion to linking my facebook account, I found their official response:

“This does not stop you creating the Facebook account adding nothing to it and making it totally private as the Facebook account does not have to be actively used.”

Actually, that mildly violates on of facebook’s terms of service:

“You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.”

And, if like me, you already have a facebook account and don’t want to link it, then it violates another term of service by suggesting to basically create a dummy account:

“You will not create more than one personal profile.”

Filed under: Computers / Internet by James Fryer