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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I’ve also noticed my front page of reddit will randomly have a YouTube video I watched in a post on r/videos with like 5 up votes and 2 comments. Can reddit see my YouTube watch history? And why are they targeting me through r/videos to watch a video I’ve already seen
Spotify has AI that actively listens to your surroundings to better advertise and show you suggestions you’d like.
They’re also heavily invested in a company that is developing real-time battlefield data collection to make autonomous decisions on tactics.
Because you went to the concert obviously? Some app was tracking your location and shared that with Spotify.
Last weekend I was driving with my niece in the car. I had my Spotify playing music through my Iphone. I was asking her about what music she liked, and I mentioned two artists by name. A few hours later, I was driving again, and both of those artists played randomly. I have a lot of liked songs. Could it be a coincidence?
Cox media group admitted to using device microphone to serve ads. They worked with Google and meta
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/google-facebook-partner-admits-it-can-listen-to-device-microphone-to-serve-ads-2888041/
[because your phone is listening to what’s going on around it](https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/is-your-phone-listening-marketing-firm-confirms-tech-behind-targeted-ads-124090400592_1.html)
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.
I wish the Reply All podcast still existed, this is exactly the kind of thing Alex on that show would have gotten to the bottom of for you.
You are tracked. All day, every day, everything about you is tracked. Most of it is anonymous, meaning it doesn’t have identifying data to you specifically, just that this phone was in this area or on this website. All of that gets fed to the algorithm. And there’s nothing you can do about it because politicians are paid to pass laws that allow tech companies to do it.
Is it finally the first generation that doesn’t know? I guess it’s been over 25 years so this must be it.
Welcome and good luck whatever you decide to do about it.
Personally I try to make it fun. I’ll visit my sister and talk to my niece about that abortion she’s thinking about (she’s 8) in front of the Samsung and just wait. Then I’ll pretend to talk about that divorce I caused and see what that gets them at 1:30 in the afternoon.
Used to be we’d know where a person was and what they were up to by watching the meter.
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