Spotify is at it again. Please share if you use the free version.
Several times now Spotify has made news for questionable items.
Let's look at those
quickly.
Spyware / Adware
Using your information how ever they please
Hard drive abuse
It is not a suspicion on my part and it is not the users going on mis-informed rants. These are things you can easily look up and I encourage everyone to always do their own research and ask the questions people / companies don't want asked!
I will as always do my best to answer those questions, and of course if I don't have the answer I won't shoot one off the hip like some people we know. I do research and have spent a lot of time in my life trouble shooting issues, reading, and finding out the why. So in the occasion I come across something new or different I know how to research things and I do.
I understand you are like me, and you know when someone isn't being upfront and honest especially if you've been blessed with children. :)
Point 1. Spotify and spyware-adware viruses.
Several times in the past now Spotify has been directly responsible for PC's being infected due to the ad services on the free PC version of the Spotify streaming program.
It seems to me and others that Spotify does not look into who buys ads and perhaps has not done a good job of vetting them before publishing the purchased ad space to the user base of the desktop program.
This infectious behavior occurred in October of 2016 this year. Also in March of 2015 Avast, Bitdefender, and a few others were blocking Spotify when it tried to update noting it had malicious code inside.
In August of 2013 this was happening as well.
Honestly my opinion on Spotify is on mobile it is wonderful, but if you want it on your desktop, I wouldn't use it unless you have their ad less premium service to just protect yourself!
Point two: copied from current Spotify user agreement sorry this is long but proves a valuable point.
If you connect to the Service using credentials from a Third Party Application (as defined in the Terms and Conditions) (e.g., Facebook), you authorise us to collect your authentication information, such as your username and encrypted access credentials. We may also collect other information available on or through your Third Party Application account, including, for example, your name, profile picture, country, hometown, email address, date of birth, gender, friends’ names and profile pictures, and networks.
You may also choose to voluntarily add other information to your profile, such as your mobile phone number and mobile service provider
3.3 Your mobile device
We may provide features that rely on the use of additional information on your mobile device or require access to certain services on your mobile device that will enhance your Spotify experience but are not required to use the Service. (In other words, information that falls in the second category described in the Introduction to this Policy.) For example, we might allow you to upload photos to your profile, connect with friends, or let you use voice commands to control the Service.
So what constitutes giving that access?
They never say. A mention of we may ask once, and we probably won't look is there. But you really should go through the whole document. At the time I wrote this originally for another site and the copy I wrote from it was very vague in its description but did make clear they can and will if linked to social media have your information, pictures, contacts, location and would use that to sale ads to you.
In a nutshell, it could be when Android ask to give permission to Spotify, or it could be innocent and in the future Spotify will ask nicely for each and every item you give them.
Companies these days are all about free free free. Then in the background they collect as much big data about users as they can to sale it for marketing reasons. It's how they keep it 'free' look at Windows 10. Same thing.
Point 3:
Hard drive use. Copied from Spotify Community forum. User:Jordan
I recently noticed that something was writing a lot of data to my SSD so I started looking trough what could be causing it, and Spotify ended up being the culprit, it was writing close to 10GB an hour to my drive at one point.
I checked the I/O write data with the S.M.A.R.T data on my drive and it wrote 28.305.469.806 Bytes of data in about 2 and a half hours, I've also noticed that it only writes the data when playing music, still completely unacceptable.
The users in the forum complaining, they are right. Further down the list as the months go by more problems are described and it is found that Spotify is caching the entire playlist even when not being used writing terabytes of information in hours to hard drives.
That would reduce the life of a SSD hard drive from 20 years to 1 year.
The users were ignored, so they came up with a work around to it, and roughly 2.5 months after this latest fiasco with hard drive utilization maxing out an update was released. But it took a long time for users to get it.
Now there is a fix circulating around for that too!
My opinion, using it on your phone seems safe I have for years with success and a lot of enjoyment. But please on a desktop or laptop PC use Spotify with caution and please keep it disabled on your PC for its sake when not in use!
