SPOTIFY
Spotify is distinct from the other platforms included because it's not necessarily a social networking platform, and it doesn't employ the use of any kind of newsfeed or postings. If you're a Spotify Premium subscriber, your streaming experience is never interrupted by ads. Spotify recommends music in the app and site interface for all users and provides algorithmically generated playlists for its users based on their data. My data download revealed inferences categorizing me for targeted ads far beyond the scope of music.
In app playlist view
Playlist as data
The content of every file with the exception of Inferences is familiar. It's a lists of the artists I follow, every song I've listened to, my search queries and saved songs. All of these are visible in Spotify's user interface, although they appear differently in the data report. The in-app view is very polished and designed for ease of use and understanding. The data view is a json, a file type used in web and app development that provides information to be rendered on the webpage or in the app. In other words, it's made for ease of use and understanding of computers, not people.
Inferences
The only new-to-me information in my Spotify data download exists in the Inferences.json folder.
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The list is extensive. It's filled with hundreds and hundreds of consumer categories that I've been placed in. Below is just a small segment of them.
The list is often repetitive, noting the same category multiple times to distinguish between different geographic regions. Here, I'm an "Action Movie Enthusiast" in Australia, France, and the United Kingdom, but apparently not in the United States, since it's absent from the category.
Other categories are redundant in different ways. If there is a major distinction between "Art & Culture" and "Art and Culture Enthusiasts" it's not clear what that difference is here.
There are also categories that completely contradict each other. A person cannot be both engaged and single at once in the real world. In the world of market categorization, nothing has to be mutually exclusive. In data form I am labeled "Single" and "Engaged" and as far as the data is concerned, both of those things are true because my data has allowed Spotify to infer that it is.
Reading through the list of inferences, it's not clear how they were derived from my listening habits alone. How does a Bob Dylan playlist inform Spotify that I fall into the category "3p_Engineer_UK?" Spotify gives a brief explanation of how they draw inferences on the Understanding my Data page of their support site:
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"We draw certain inferences about your interests and preferences based on your usage of the Spotify service and using data obtained from our advertisers and other advertising partners. This includes a list of market segments with which you are currently associated. Depending on your settings, this data may be used to serve interest-based advertising to you within the Spotify service."5
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While it's not unlikely that Google, for example, has information similar to this with my inferences grouped by advertiser rather than interest, they don't present it that way. Notably absent from Spotify's inferences are the one thing I had expected to find there: music genres - something I could easily map back to my activity on the app. With my Google inferences, I could understand how those inferences came to be based on the information I knew I had been giving to Google. With Spotify, those types of connections are not evident.