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Spotify Cracks Down on Family Plan Misuse By Periodically Vetting Where You Live


steven36

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To make sure subscribers aren’t abusing Spotify’s family plan, the streaming music giant has started checking in on where they live. Over and over again.

 

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It’s all in the Premium Family program’s terms of service that Spotify updated in August. A single sentence outlines this new policy, which explains why the change went unnoticed until CNET spotted it Thursday.

 

Premium Family subscribers must provide a home address using Google Maps or enable locations services for Spotify when signing up, information the company now vets periodically.

 

Up to six people can share Spotify’s Premium Family plan. While its guidelines maintain that those six people are supposed to all live at the same address, apparently enough subscribers were saying “screw that noise” and sharing their account details with whomever to get in on that sweet, sweet $14.99 per month deal that the company felt the need to put its foot down. Considering six separate Spotify Premium subscriptions would cost four times as much, I’m not exactly shocked.

 

Until now, Spotify didn’t have any procedures for assessing whether its subscribers were doing right by its terms of service, so it wasn’t exactly difficult to get around this rule. Then last year, the company began asking its subscribers for their GPS information as part of a pilot run, one that apparently did not go over well given today’s increasingly data-conscious culture, according to TechCrunch.

 

But I guess Spotify wasn’t deterred by this since the company now ask subscribers to confirm their home address “from time to time” to remain on the plan thanks to these new TOS. Gizmodo reached out to Spotify to get an idea of how often that is exactly. I mean, are we talking “time to time” as in how often I change my water filter, or how often I (should) call my parents?

 

Spotify didn’t immediately respond to our request, but the company did provide the following statement to CNET about the location data require with this new policy:

“This data is encrypted and can be edited by the plan owner as needed. The location data that is collected during Premium Family account creation is only used by Spotify for that purpose.”

Unfortunately, at the moment it seems that families that want to get in on that discounted Spotify rate but don’t all live at the same address are simply SOL.

 

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betting they are doing location checks based on ip addresses.. 

then check if user are hiding behind vpns.. 

 

alao they can detect if account is abused across different countries 

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14 minutes ago, bayer said:

betting they are doing location checks based on ip addresses.. 

then check if user are hiding behind vpns.. 

 

alao they can detect if account is abused across different countries 

even ip address can't really detect accurate location tho. for instance, the IP address located at Kuala Lumpur but the user is located at Shah Alam. Two different location, so location check via IP is not that accurate.

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16 hours ago, Jogs said:

What about people moving around, going to office, school etc!

 Good question tho. The clause "We may from time to time ask for re-verification of your home address in order to confirm that you are still meeting the eligibility criteria" on the newly updated TOS for  is somehow confusing.

 

Plus, according to PCMag:

 

A spokesperson for Spotify confirmed that, "Once verification of a family member's home address is completed, we do not store their location data or track their location at any time." The company also states that the location data is encrypted and can be edited by the account owner.

 

https://www.pcmag.com/news/370741/spotify-premium-family-plan-now-requires-location-sharing

 

If they do not store location data or track their location at any time, then why Spotify asking re-verification from time to time? Sounds obviously tracking users location. 

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10 hours ago, Jogs said:

You can share with your friend and whenever your friend needs to re-verify, he /she will come to your house. 😂

well, that will be inconvenient for them anyway. If Spotify wants to re-verify periodically, then he/she will come back to house periodically. transport wasn't that cheap tho, and somehow tiring.

 

but one can use GPS/Location faker app to bypass Spotify location-checking thingy.

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6 hours ago, Edward Raja said:

but one can use GPS/Location faker app to bypass Spotify location-checking thingy.

Surely they will know from the usage logs about the discrepancies

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well why don't they set same fair pricing for all countries.

a premium monthly in philipines is around 3 usd i'm
guessing a family account would be 5 usd if compared
to european and usa price point.

as many has mentioned before they can only ask if you
are in the same family since ip's change from home
adress, school, work, ferry, buss, vpn etc.

as for me i use the free version and listen to podcasts.
if i want music while i'm at my computer i youtube them
which also shows me the official video.

for the record. the spotify app is the worst app in history.

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6 hours ago, bayer said:

Surely they will know from the usage logs about the discrepancies

Usage logs even can't do anything at all. Given that Spotify had issues in the past regarding data collection controversy through GPS tracking for re-verification, logging location in usage logs is a no-no.

 

Besides, tracking location using Google Maps and IP address isn't that accurate, so the accuracy of Google Maps is not really guaranteed to be precise. For example, Google Maps reported that I live in Petaling Jaya, but in reality I live at Puchong. Petaling Jaya and Puchong is 15km++ apart. I agreed to what @halvgris said also, IP address will change whenever moving from one location to other location.

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