In a move that’s bound to stir some controversy, Spotify has sent out emails to some of its premium family plan customers to confirm their home address using GPS data. The mail says that failure to do so might lead to the user losing access to the plan.
Spotify rules make it mandatory for at least two out of five members in a family plan to live at the same address. However, it is common for friends and families living across different parts of a city, country or even different countries to have a single Spotify family plan. Spotify presumably wants to curb down such a practice which is why it has sent out emails to some of its customers to confirm their home address using their GPS co-ordinates.
@Spotify Why do you need my GPS location to continue offering me a "Premium discount"? I pay for the family plan and it should not matter where my family lives. Will you cancel my account if my family gets too far from each other? #wtf #fail pic.twitter.com/HauQtHXSUA
— suck (@unaligned) September 18, 2018
The music stream company makes it clear that it is only asking for the GPS data of its users to allow them to offer its streaming services at a Premium discount. It will only use their “GPS data to verify” their location “and nothing else.”
For now, Spotify seems to have only sent out such emails to its subscribers in Germany who are pretty miffed with it. The company has also issued a statement to Quartz on this whole issue:
“Spotify is currently testing improvements to the user experience of Premium for Family with small user groups in select markets. We are always testing new products and experiences at Spotify, but have no further news to share regarding this particular feature test at this time.”
Spotify move likely stems from the fact that many people end up creating a family plan and adding their friends or families living in other parts of the world where the music subscription service is either more expensive or not available. This is something that many Netflix users also do since the streaming service does not offer a family plan but it does allow for users to have multiple profiles in one account.
Nonetheless, Spotify’s move here of asking its customers to confirm their home location using GPS data might be a bit too far-fetched and irk a lot of its users.
What do you think about this change from Spotify? Are you okay with it? Or will you cancel your subscription to it if you receive a similar mail? Drop a comment and let us know!
[Via QZ]
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