Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly

It might seem like just music, but streaming services are susceptible to what’s called “surveillance creep,” or “function creep.” A surveillance system might start out with one purpose, but over time, its purpose might shift and expand beyond its original use case. We might know that a streaming app is watching our every move, but it’s just to recommend us music, we think—and so, we are conditioned to consider it low stakes. So much so that when, for example, a music app starts also monitoring and mapping our voices, or tracking down our search engine activity off-app, maybe we don’t even notice. Or, when it takes the most basic facts of our listening behavior and sells them to data brokers as “mood data,” which they then use to assemble more complex profiles on us, maybe we don’t even care. But these are fundamental violations of our privacy, and whether that right is encoded into law or not, it matters. The UK privacy advocacy group Privacy International puts it this way: “Privacy is how we seek to protect ourselves and society against arbitrary and unjustified use of power, by controlling what can be known about us and done to us, while protecting us from those who aim to exert control over our data, and ultimately all aspects of our lives.” As the tech and music industries alike aspire to ever more invasive ways to extract data and profits from us, it’s crucial to remember the bigger picture.11 What’s more, privacy is just a basic human right, one that we should seek t...