Wrap Your Year in Data

We’re in December, which means that the Christmas Wrapped season is upon us. People are sharing their “year reports” everywhere and it isn’t just from Spotify.

Spotify’s year-end report is especially concerning, because not only does it remind you how they are not paying the artists you love, but it is also comically bad. The cut-off for data is in autumn, ignoring one full month of the year and probably even more.

Spotify is not the only one now in the business of using your personal data for fancy displays of all the activity they managed to capture. Apple Music does the same. I have seen Discord sending notifications about a similar thing, although it didn’t work for me, because I apparently set my privacy settings correctly and they were unable to process it. This was the case for many of my Discord friends. At least we can say that Discord respects (or pretends to respect) user choice.

I understand why people like these kinds of things. It provides you with a short and convenient way to look at a bit of your life in the past year. What most people don’t realize is that to achieve this, the service must be collecting absurdly huge amounts of data about you. And it shows you only a smidge of them. I guess, once the steaming, hot pile of feces is wrapped in a shiny cover with all the bells and whistles of modern web design, most people throw all their worries about privacy out of the window. If they even had any to begin with.

Which to me is even scarier. People don’t care about their privacy. About their lives being analyzed, dissected, and presented not just to them, but to any other entity willing to pay enough.

I hope the “Wrapped” virus won’t spread to other services. I was already disappointed by Discord doing something similar. What is next? Your year in ChatGPT conversations? Your spreadsheet look-back in Excel?

I do, however, use one service which I specifically ask to do this - last.fm. But they do it by analyzing what you willingly scrobble to their platform. And give you the results only after the whole year is over. Like any sane person should.

So remember, the nicer the presentation and the weirder the facts about your usage get, the more the service knows about you. Imagine all the nice dashboards and graphs they produce for their other clients, who pay for the user data.