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It’s interesting how this has become a concern. In the MP3 era, pretty much every obsessive music fan I knew IRL was signed up to Last.fm and scrobbling (i.e. u
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
It’s interesting how this has become a concern. In the MP3 era, pretty much every obsessive music fan I knew IRL was signed up to Last.fm and scrobbling (i.e. uploading a recording of listening) every track that was played on their MP3 player. You could then compare your listening to your friends’, meet new people in your town with the same tastes, etc. There were no concerns back then about privacy, because no companies had yet so clearly abused it. But considering how Last.fm has always struggled with monetizing the data it does get, even now the site sparks few concerns.
(For those whose privacy concerns would prevent them from using Last.fm to keep track of their music listening over time, there is Libre.fm. However, all it is good for is keeping personal records, not socializing with many other listeners.)
- demetrius 3y agoThere is an important difference: with Last.fm, you choose what you share. If you want to listen to something one time, you could just open the same file in another player and that's it. With Spotify or Yandex.Music, however, everything is shared, and you can't use a different player.
- politelemon 3y agoYour comment misses a fundamental point about privacy. Privacy is not about being hidden away, it's having control over your data. Last FM had a good set of privacy controls, in that users could send their tracks over and if memory serves, correct me, they could choose to socialise it.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoYes, that is one view of privacy. But on HN, privacy concerns are also about use of data for targeted advertising regardless of what controls are there. Last.fm’s heyday predates the modern ad tracking that creeps so many out.
- loughnane 3y agoYeah, that’s the line for me. Firms talk about controls but if there is even one person in the world who can look up all the media I’ve consumed them that’s one too many. Gives me the creeps.
- loughnane 3y agoYou’ve got to put that whole era in context. Before it we all listened to the radio or physical media we owned. There was no surveillance infrastructure, let alone business models depending on it. Then the internet blew up. I was so excited about all the new communities and tools that it made available to us. I didn’t think about privacy at all since I never had before and now there was all this cool stuff. I slowly came to understand what was happening and now that I do i can’t go back. I don’t begrudge any one service from existing, but I think it’s bad if the default way to participate in our culture is through platforms that Hoover up everything you do.