Angry Reaction To Spotify's New Facebook ID Requirement | Hacker News Reader

Angry Reaction To Spotify's New Facebook ID Requirement

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

105 pointsdonohoe31 comments

I actually cancelled my $9.99/mo membership after all this. I still really like Spotify and Facebook's new timeline. At first, I even really dug the new Spotify integration. However, I just noticed how much of my internet is tied back to Facebook with very little real utility gained and that makes me uneasy.

I feel a little mixed here as I make my living developing a Facebook app and now I've got Disconnect for Chrome installed and won't be using any web apps that offer only Facebook Connect. I guess I just don't really support Facebook touching every corner of the internet.

</putsontinfoilhat>

I'm hoping they're not stupid enough to require existing subscribers to link their account with Facebook, but I'm not holding my breath, and I'll cancel the minute they try and force me to link with Facebook.

Unfortunately it seems that many companies have decided that "social" is the way to go, and those of us who don't want to share everything with everyone all the time get left out in the cold.

Yeah, I just tested my desktop and mobile app and they still work. If they force me to log in with facebook I'll be forced to cancel since I do not have a facebook account.

This is what I am waiting to see. I have enjoyed my time on Spotify but I will drop it like a bad habit if they require me to join Facebook.

My GF asked me to sign up for Spotify, and I planned on doing it today. But having to use a Facebook account stopped me—although I might make a fake account just so I can log in.

Can I ask you why? Any company that jumps into bed with Facebook clearly thinks no more of user privacy than does Facebook. There's every reason, then, to expect Spotify to abuse user trust and user data just as Facebook has done.

Does this not bother you, even in principle? Bogus FB account or not, this kind of behavior should be rejected out of hand.

"Can I ask you why?"

Sure! You're definitely right about jumping into bed with FB. What bothers me isn't just a cavalier attitude toward privacy—it's linking up everything I do online into one massive database trail. If company A is lousy with privacy, as are companies B and C, that's not great, but what feels worse is having all of them linking everything one does together.

Also, I realize this is already happening anyway—I recently installed Ghostery after seeing a Hacker News comment about it: http://www.ghostery.com/ . At least using it allows one to fight back to some limited extent by blocking a lot of trackers, sprites, and so forth.

Facebook correlates different accounts by checking from which computers they are used, so you probably want to use a proxy to access the fake account.

There are not a lot of things I dislike more than having to create a new account for every new webservice out there, even just to try it out. But at the same time, in the age of datamining I feel even more uneasy about cross-logins. So even if I had a facebook account, which I don't, I would not want to use if for anything but facebook.

How long until we read about a company that's storing significant amounts of data gleaned from the API's of Facebook/LinkedIn/etc. being hacked?

I just saw this in the article: "MOG ... will also require new users to log in with Facebook, said David Hyman, the company’s chief executive."

Does that mean no one will be able to sign up for MOG (another music service) without providing a Facebook account either? Am I interpreting that correctly? I looked for a sign-up button on MOG but didn't immediately see any way to sign up without a Facebook account.

It's a really stupid move for both services, Spotify and MOG. Some users don't have Facebook accounts for whatever reason (suspension, dislike of Facebook, no need for it, etc.), and this prevents them from becoming potential customers of the music services.

You have anecdotes. They have data. It's bizarre to see how many people are willing to call this decision a mistake while my Facebook Ticker is full of people playing songs on Spotify. The new signups from the increased visibility probably dwarf the number of people who end their subscriptions in protest.

It's quite possible that this "stupid move" is also a wildly profitable move.

On the other hand, a ton of people I know have signed up for Spotify and Rdio simply because they saw them in their feeds. Hell, I only heard about Earbits that way and I love it.

Maybe that was the cost to get on the Music tab.

I found this both frustrating and ironic as someone recommended MOG to me when I told him I was going to stop using Spotify over their new policy, even though I have an old account.

If you click "Get Mog" on the top menu and then pick one of the service levels you are still able to create a MOG account. Wonder how long that will last.

I just did this. After registering, they sent me a confirmation "click this link to prove it's your real email address" message. After completing that, they sent me a (plaintext) confirmation email, containing my username and password.

Email around my password is bad enough. But the fact that the final confirmation message, containing my password, was several minutes removed from my initial registration, probably[1] demonstrates that they're not using one-way hashes for password storage.

If this is correct, then it may just be that Facebooks' stewardship of my data is better than MOG's.

[1] IIRC, the "prove it's my email" linked page asked me to log in. If so, then they might have intercepted that login request, and sent that back via email. That's possible, but I'd be surprised.

Yes, Mog actually had that a few days before f8 when they announced they are offering free streaming. The only way to sign-up was with Facebook, which is why I didn't sign-up.

Why does "social" have to be pushed down my throat?

This. Times infinity.

I really don't understand why Spotify needed to become Facebook ONLY. Give the possibility to login with facebook (and possibly OpenID etc.) - awesome. Force me to do so - stupid.

I can only guess that Facebook promised them something in return, and I don't like this.

It would be good to be able to share stuff between social media and other internet services. It's just that it's me who wishes to decide myself what to share, not somebody else.

Conversely, it would be terrific if I could just use Google+, Diaspora, Facebook or any other network and be in touch with somebody who's not in Google+, Diaspora, Facebook or some other network, and share statuses from one network to other networks where I have friends.

But something like that goes so deeply against the fixation that these networks need to be rivals that it won't happen soon. Till then, it's quite sad. I have most people in Facebook but I only log on to Facebook on a need basis via incognito browser window. I would like to hang out on Google+ but roughly speaking only my nerd friends are there so this cuts my connections down to one subgroup. Diaspora would be nice now that their site seems to be more in working order but nobody I know is there.

Maybe it'll all converge back to irc+screen at some point, having come a full circle in 20 years or so.

I was born in '90, so the good days with IRC and quality mailing lists had passed while I was growing up. I wasn't there, yet I somehow still miss it.

It's still there... and still quite active. Most "projects" and things have a channel somewhere, quite a lot on freenode - including our very own hackernews (irc.freenode.net #startups)

From Mr. Ek of Spotify: "We’ll try lots of things, and probably screw up from time to time, he wrote, but we value feedback and will make changes based on it."

We'll soon see if that is true or not.

I actually think it's kind of funny how us nerds dream about this globally-connected society where you don't even NEED logins and data flies around effortlessly.

Then when it actually happens, we all flip out.

This happened when cypherpunks/cypherpunks was the de-facto account/password to a great many services. Hell, I haven't even tried it any time recently (there's also the question of what cypherpunk's email address is...).

There's a large world of difference between "you don't even NEED logins" and "you are logged in via your SkyBookNet account automatically on every site you visit".

Keep on flipping out, people.

I, personally, would have no problem with this requirement if it was a ethical entity; which Facebook is not.

I think once an entity has the ability to do it, people will tend to think they are unethical, or at least be suspicious. Google and Facebook weren't considered "potentially evil" 5 years ago.

The problem is not in the ability, but in the incentives. If a paid service offered the same functionality, I would be more inclined to trust them. As it is, Facebook/Google have every incentive to collect too much information and use it in a way I wouldn't like.

Some Facebook employee slipped (via twitter I think?) that Facebook's working on some music offering that lets you listen to what your friends are listening to at that moment. This could possibly be tied in with that.

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