THE WALLS HAVE EARS

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 210 - 18/01/2012

I'm very far from being an online privacy nut. I don't pay for fancy password storage services, I often click buttons to give feedback or share things like playlists, and none of my time is spent ranting against Google and Facebook on online forums. However events over the last couple of weeks have possibly pushed me over some threshold of tolerance. But perhaps it's best if I tell the story from the beginning.

I went away for two weeks over the New Year, and made the stupid mistake of trying to be a responsible citizen by turning off all my electrical appliances before leaving. That included my BT broadband router, but when I returned last week I discovered that my internet service had not actually gone away entirely but was being throttled down to an unusable 200kbps, up and down. This has actually happened to me once before, last autumn after a far longer period of disuse, but that time it came back of its own accord overnight. This time it didn't and so on the second day I rang BT Broadband support to report a fault. I'm happy to report that both the Indian gentlemen who handled my problem were models of politeness and efficiency, displayed a full technical grasp of the problem, rang back when they promised and escalated the fault to its proper level. (Why BT permits it to happen in the first place is for a future column and isn't my topic here).

Once the engineers have reset your ADSL line it takes several days to re-train the local DSLAM before full speed is achieved again, and so I emailed our own RWC net guru Cassidy to gripe about things in general. He advised me to use the line heavily during the retraining process because "the more data it moves the more retrain info it has to go on". I thought for a while about the best way to achieve unattended line loading, and decided that Spotify, set to repeat the same playlist, is the easiest way for downloads while syncing a huge directory of photographs up to DropBox is a reasonable way to occupy the uplink overnight. That's when things started to get weird.

Next day I received an email from my sister in the far north of Scotland inquiring whether everything was all right. It read "Maggie Pountain commented on a playlist you listened to: András Schiff - Bach: Goldberg Variations. Maggie wrote: 'Haven't you turned this off or can't you sleep.'" She was clearly able to see what was playing on my Spotify account in real time, and worried because it hadn't changed for 12 hours or more. Next day I had more mails from various friends commenting on my listening habits, worried that I was becoming obsessed by Ravel and Debussy. Now much as I love Bach, Ravel and Debussy's piano music, I had of course chosen these particular playlists for their length rather than quality on this occasion, and was only actually listening in short bursts whenever I happened to be at the keyboard. The main point though was that, all of a sudden, everyone in the world seemed to know what I was listening to.

In my devil-may-care, I'm-not-a-privacy-nut mode I had indeed voluntarily agreed to link my Spotify and Facebook accounts so that friends could see and share my playlists (and vice versa), but that's not at all the same as everyone knowing what you're listening to right now in real time, which is decidedly creepy. Then I realised some of the friends who'd mailed weren't even on Facebook. I logged into my Spotify preferences, which I hadn't touched for several years, and discovered two tick boxes called "Share my activity on Spotify Social" and "Show what I listen to on Facebook" which I don't recall seeing before and which were both ticked. I unticked them both. A rootle around among the preferences also explained that "Private Session" option which had started to appear on the pull-down menu for my account: if you don't want everyone to see what you're listening to you can choose to make this session private, but the default is public and your private session will terminate each time you restart the Spotify client. This is pretty much the sort of behaviour that makes real privacy nuts rant against Facebook, and even if Spotify did catch the disease from Facebook that's really not any sort of an excuse.

I can't really say why people listening-in to what I'm playing right now is more disturbing to me than any of the similar stunts Facebook pulls, it just is. It's not as though I spend a lot of time furtively listening to Hitler's speeches, Lloyd-Webber musicals or porno-music (is there such a thing?), but music is important to me and my current choice feels far more intimate than, say, my political opinions, which I'm happy to share with anyone who'll stand still for long enough. A nagging feeling persists that this episode has tipped me over some threshold, into becoming an antisocial networker: I find myself ever more irritated with Facebook and have been poised on the verge of closing my account several times recently. Spotify though I can't do without.