I don’t like country, but last night I did a friend a favor and went to a country concert with her. Today Spotify is suddenly playing songs from the artist in my playlist. I’ve never listened to country songs before and certainly didn’t do anything to indicate to Spotify that I wanted to listen to this kind of music. How did Spotify do this and how do I get them to stop? This is so creepy.
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People who think this is due to nerfarious purposes like Spotify spying on you (taking records from your mic, camera, or using your phone’s location data, or peering into your email app, or scraping your social media to infer you went to a concert) are wrong. Spotify doesn’t declare and request access to those permissions on iOS or Android.
Neither do they buy data about you from a third party. There isn’st a shadowy data broker that knows you went to a concert.
The simpler, much more mundane answer is that ML models for recommender systems are very good at finding correlations and structure in underlying data. There’s the myth about how Target knew a customer was pregnant before they did based solely on shopping habbits, which later turned out to be false, but actually, ML and recommender systems are capable of these kinds of inferences given enough data.
They don’t need to know you went to the concert to recommend you those songs, if all your Spotify friends started listening to those songs, they can recommend you that song without knowing you went to a concert featuring those songs. Your friends beside, maybe a ton of people similar to you in other ways whom you don’t know but whom Spotify considers your tastes and profile similar to were also likely to have attended this concert, after which they listened to these songs on Spotify, strengthening the correlation between you / people like you and these songs. All they know is people in your cohort or similar like these songs, so it thinks you’ll like them too.
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