[Privacy] Private Session should stay active

[jakenfinn]

Let's face it. We've all used Spotify to listen to music that we would be embarassed to advertise publically.

Whether it's kittens meowing Christmas songs, that your friends would never let you live down, or a hardcore rap album, that you wouldn't want your 8 year old cousin to go and listen to because his cool aunt or uncle likes it.

When it comes to this social music app, privacy is not a convenient bonus feature, it's a critical necessity.

Currently, the only way to listen to songs privately on Spotify, is to go to the settings and activate a private session. This is not only annoying, since I constantly have to navigate through settings to activate privacy on my phone, it's stressful because you have to worry about whether or not certain people can see what you're listening too. My primary music app should not cause anxiety about what I share publically.

From a 2011 blog post "Spotify is all about sharing and discovering new music. It’s entirely up to you what you decide to share and what you keep private."

With the first part in mind, it makes sense that spotify would default to making all of the music you listen to public to your followers but the second part is not true. Anyone can follow me on Spotify and if I have to continuously activate a private session, there will inevitably be times when I forget. As a paying customer, I should have the ability to hide what I listen to if I please and activate privacy indefinitely.

[blake]

Marked as New Idea. This idea is related to the similar inactive idea.

[2Changz]

You can do two things. Go to Edit - Preferences - Social - and toggle the switch to off for Publish my activity on Spotify and Share my activity on Facebook.

You can also click the drop arrow next to your profile icon to turn to private easily.

[Paulmorgan64]

If 2Chainz is correct, it would be a bonus if Spotify would confirm that by having the private session always be turned on (top right in blue) so we know it's in private mode..

It always looks like we have to turn on the private listening session to confirm it's defintiely working..

[Opportunist]

I fully support this idea, privacy options shouldn't have to be turned on manually every time you use the program.

[ChubbyCheese]

I actually think that private sessions should be the default setting; so select non-private if you want this and then the font should turn blue.

Having this default setting wrong is actually more annoying than other defaults such as free McAfee offers, Ask toolbars, newsletter subscriptions and such because this setting needs to be corrected every day...  so if you don't want private to be the default, at least allow the user to change the default setting then.

This is not a new idea since March, it has been requested over years. You should not ignore it because bugs like this add up when Spotify is compared against any competitors.

[bkaje]

I understand that to keep Spotify social, they want to make sharing on by default, and don't want us to forget to turn it back on when we make it private.

Couldn't the same objective be achieved by placing a banner at the top after X amount of hours that let's you know that you still aren't sharing, instead of automatically starting the sharing in the background, all sneaky-like?

I would imagine it to say something like:

"Hey! We're still in a private session, and your friends are missing out on your groovy beats. Turn sharing back on? Yes or No, dismiss for 4 hours."

[MattiVaan]

This is very important! Every time I start spotify I have to start private session.

It would be good if it would remember the setting!

I've been a long premium subscriber and this is very annoying 😞

[NoValidTitle]

I love that this is marked as a new idea in 2015. People have been asking for it for YEARS and Spotify clearly couldn't care less about privacy. Please implement this already.

[Harmonie66]

 What I'd like to know is whether my privacy preferences from the desktop app sync with my mobile app and with my Spotify channel on Roku or my smart TV. Especially with the Roku and/or smart TV, since I can't seem to find anywhere to set private session mode within them.

[Cr1spy69]

Please make the 'Private Session' default. I don't want anyone to know I'm dancing around to Kylie Minogue. 😞