There’s no reason to freak out about Spotify’s new privacy policy

People have been up in arms about Spotify’s recent privacy policy update after Wired painted it as an “eerie” agreement that “you can’t do squat about,” which several other publications echoed. However, if you actually look at the update you’ll notice that, while Spotify made the mistake of not being more clear about when it will ask for information and how it will use it, the company did make it clear that it would ask, not just take. Even so, Spotify’s CEO has personally apologized for the whole incident in a recent blog post. 

No, Spotify doesn’t want to root around your phone’s address book, or your photos. That’s the message the music service is sending out today — after clumsily suggesting otherwise earlier this week. “We should have done a better job in communicating what these policies mean and how any information you choose to share will – and will not – be used,” the company says in a post attributed to CEO Daniel Ek. “We understand people’s concerns about their personal information and are 100 percent committed to protecting our users’ privacy and ensuring that you have control over the information you share.” Ek’s post — titled “Sorry!” — is a reaction to a reaction to new privacy terms Spotify began rolling out this week in different countries around the world. The terms very a bit depending on the territory, but you can get a good sense of them here. The problem, for some folks: “We may ask for customer permission to collect information from new sources, such as address book, location, and sensor data from the mobile device to improve the customer experience and inform product decisions.”