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Comment by matlin | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how much data this involves per user. This is clearly a massive undertaking when you're talking about ~250 million users but I bet it would be easy to provide the same info if all the data was local on a device and each user ran their own query. This assumes that the space required to store all of your listening history fits on device which I think is a safe bet.

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> This assumes that the space required to store all of your listening history fits on device which I think is a safe bet

Space-wise, yes, but users are likely using multiple devices and may have switched phones, reinstalled the app, wiped data etc.

Then you have to consider that the scripts would have to be individually written for each platform, and would have to be careful about power consumption, CPU usage etc., especially on mobile devices. And there's not just data mining but also video encoding (for the stories).

And then there's this part:

> To bring you a Decade Wrapped, we had to process these data stories over 10 years’ worth of data for all of our monthly active users

> And there's not just data mining but also video encoding

I was under the impression that the stories were live graphics. They certainly where on PC, as I had issues running the WebGL because of my script blockers.

I made a GDPR request for my data shortly after the law was enacted, and they provided me with 280mb of data for the past 90 days of me listening to music.

wow that's impressive. I did a CCPA request and got 2.2MB (466KB zipped) of data from the last year which included listening history, playlists, and search history.

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