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GDPR Article 15 Information
Below you will find the information you are entitled to about the processing of your personal data under Article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation (‘GDPR’). This information is meant to supplement, and be read in conjunction with, your downloaded personal data, to help you understand the personal data processing specific to your particular use of the Spotify Service. If you have not yet requested a copy of your personal data, please see section ‘Obtaining a copy of your personal data’ for how to do so.
Confirmation as to whether or not personal data about you is being processed
When you use the Spotify service under our free or paid options (each a ‘Service Option’ and collectively called the ‘Spotify Service’), we process your personal data as described below.
Purposes of the processing of your personal data
The table below sets out:
- our purpose for processing your personal data
- categories of personal data which we use for each purpose (see more about these categories in section 'Categories of personal data' below)
If you also would like to see the legal basis applicable to each purpose of processing, please see the table in section 4 of our Privacy Policy.
Purpose for processing your data | Categories of personal data used for the purpose |
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To provide the Spotify Service. |
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To understand, diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix issues with the Spotify Service. |
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To evaluate and develop new features, technologies, and improvements to the Spotify Service. |
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For marketing, promotion and advertising purposes. |
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To comply with a legal obligation that we are subject to. This might be:
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To comply with a request from law enforcement. This will only apply when a competent law enforcement authority contacts us. These include the police, the courts or prisons. |
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To fulfill contractual obligations with third parties. For example, our agreements with owners of content on the Spotify Service. |
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To take appropriate action with reports of intellectual property infringement and inappropriate content. |
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To establish, exercise, or defend legal claims. |
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To conduct business planning, reporting, and forecasting. |
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To process your payment. |
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To detect and prevent fraud. For example, fraudulent payments and fraudulent use of the Spotify Service. |
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To conduct research and surveys. |
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Categories of personal data
The table below describes the categories of personal data we process and use. As detailed below, the collection and processing of some personal data is dependent on your Service Option (e.g. Free or Premium) and the features you choose to use (such as creating a playlist or turning on a voice feature). If you are unsure about which of the described data has been processed in your particular use of the Spotify Service, please see your personal data download to understand the specific data items we have collected and processed in your case or contact us.
Category | Description |
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User Data | Personal data that we need to create your Spotify account and that enables you to use the Spotify Service. The type of data collected and used depends on the type of Service Option you have, how you create your account, the country you are in, and if you use third party services to sign in. This may include your:
We receive some of this data from you from the sign up form or account page. We also collect some of this data from your device e.g. country or region. For more information about how we collect and use this data, see ‘Your general (non-precise) location’ in the Usage Data category. |
Street Address Data | If your Street Address Data is included in your downloaded data, we process it for the following reasons:
In some cases, we may use a third party application to help you verify your address, such as Google Maps. |
Usage Data | Personal data processed about you when you’re accessing or using the Spotify Service. There are a few types of information this includes, listed in the following sections and as you will find if you download your data. Information about how you use Spotify Examples include:
Your technical data Examples include:
Your general (non-precise) location Your general location includes country, region or state. We may learn this from technical data (e.g. your IP address, language setting of your device) or payment currency. We need this to
Your device sensor data Motion-generated or orientation-generated mobile sensor data (e.g. accelerometer or gyroscope) if needed to provide features of the Spotify Service that require this data. |
Voice Data | If voice features are available in your market and where you’ve chosen to use a voice feature, we collect and process voice data. Voice data means audio recordings of your voice and transcripts of those recordings. For more information on how different voice features work, and how you can control and turn them off, see our Voice Control Policy. |
Payment and Purchase Data | If you make any purchases from Spotify or sign up for a trial, we process your payment data. This includes if you buy a paid Service Option. The exact personal data collected and used will vary depending on the payment method. It will include information such as:
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Survey and Research Dat | If you have responded to a survey or taken part in user research, we collect and use the personal data you have provided. |
Categories of recipients to whom the personal data may be disclosed
This section sets out the categories of recipients of the personal data collected or generated through your use of the Spotify Service.
Publicly available information
The following personal data will always be publicly available on the Spotify Service:
- your profile name
- your profile photo
- your public playlists
- other content you post on the Spotify Service, and any associated titles, descriptions and images
- who you follow on the Spotify Service
- who follows you on the Spotify Service (you can block followers)
You or another user can share certain publicly available information on third party services, like social media or messaging platforms. This includes:
- your profile
- any content you post on Spotify and details about that content
- your public playlists
When this sharing occurs, the third party service may store a copy of it to support their features.
Personal data you may choose to share
We will only share the following personal data with those outlined in the table below:
- where we need to share personal data for the use of a Spotify Service feature, or a third party application, service or device, which you have chosen to use, or
- if you otherwise grant us your permission to share the personal data. For example, you can do it by selecting the appropriate setting in the Spotify Service or by giving your consent
Categories of recipients | Categories of data you can choose to share | Reason for sharing |
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Third party applications, services and devices you connect to your Spotify Account |
| To connect your Spotify account, or allow you to use the Spotify Service in connection with third party applications, services or devices. Examples of such third party applications, services and devices include:
You can see and remove many third party connections under ‘Apps’ in your account. |
Support community |
| To enable you to use the Spotify Support Community service. When you register for an account on the Spotify Support Community, we’ll ask you to create a specific profile name. This will be publicly displayed to anyone who uses the Spotify Support Community. We’ll also display any questions or comments you post. |
Other Spotify users |
| To share information about your use of the Spotify Service with other Spotify users, including your followers on Spotify. For example, under ‘Social’ settings you can choose whether to share your recently played artists and your playlists on your profile. You can also choose to create or join a shared playlist with others that gives you social recommendations based on your listening activity. |
Artists and record labels |
| To receive news or promotional offers from artists, record labels or other partners. You may choose to share your User Data for this purpose. You’ll always have the option to change your mind and withdraw your consent at any time. |
Information we may share
See this table for details of who we share to and why.
Categories of recipients | Categories of data | Reason for sharing |
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Service providers |
| So they can provide their services to Spotify. These service providers include those we hire to:
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Payment partners |
| So they can process your payments, and for anti-fraud purposes. |
Advertising partners |
| So they can help us deliver more relevant advertising to you on the Spotify Service, and help measure the effectiveness of ads. For example, our ad partners help us facilitate tailored advertising. What is tailored advertising?
How to control tailored advertising:
If you are ‘opted out’ of Tailored Ads in your Privacy Settings, you may still get advertising on ad-supported services (e.g. podcasts or the Free Service Option). Such advertising is based on your registration information and the content you are currently streaming on our services. For example, if you are listening to a cooking podcast, you may hear an ad for a food processor. |
Marketing Partners |
| To promote Spotify with our partners. We share certain User Data and Usage Data with these partners where necessary to:
Examples of partners include:
Our partners may also combine the personal data we share with them with other data they collect about you, e.g. your use of their services. We and our partners may use this information to present you with offers, promotions, or other marketing activities that we believe will be relevant to you. |
Hosting Platforms |
| Hosting platforms host podcasts so that they can be delivered to you. We share certain data, such as your IP address, with the hosting platforms when you play a podcast. Spotify owns two hosting platforms, Megaphone and Anchor. We also allow you to stream podcasts available from other hosting platforms not owned by Spotify. Podcast providers should explain in the show or episode description which platform is hosting the podcast. Please see the hosting platform’s own privacy policy on how they use data shared with them. |
Other partner sharing |
| To help us understand and improve the performance of our products and partnerships. You can see and remove many partner connections under ‘Apps’ in your account. |
Academic researchers |
| For activities such as statistical analysis and academic study, but only in a pseudonymised format. Pseudonymised data is where your data is identified by a code rather than your name or other information that directly identifies you. |
Spotify Measurement Companies |
| We share data with the following Spotify companies in order to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns that run on the Spotify Service:
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Other Spotify group companies |
| To carry out our daily business operations and so we can maintain and provide the Spotify Service to you. |
Law enforcement and other authorities |
| When we believe in good faith it’s necessary for us to do so, for example:
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Purchasers of our business |
| If we were to sell or negotiate to sell our business to a buyer or possible buyer. In this case, we may transfer your personal data to a successor or affiliate as part of that transaction. |
Criteria for the retention of personal data
We keep your personal data only as long as necessary to provide you with the Spotify Service and for Spotify’s legitimate and essential business purposes, such as:
- maintaining the performance of the Spotify Service
- making data-driven business decisions about new features and offerings
- complying with our legal obligations
- resolving disputes
Criteria used to determine the retention periods include:
- How can we minimize the data retention period? Our systems are designed to age out personal data in 90 days, unless another period is selected for legitimate business reasons.
- Do we need to keep data to ensure the service that users expect? We keep personal data for an appropriate period to deliver a personalized service to our users over time. We typically keep streaming history for the life of an account, for example, to provide retrospective playlists that users enjoy (e.g. Your Summer Rewind and the end-of-year Wrapped campaign) and personalized recommendations based on current listening habits.
- Are users able to update or delete the data themselves? Where users are able to see and update the personal data themselves, we keep the information for as long as the user chooses. For example, we keep your Spotify email address and other profile information until you choose to change or delete it yourself.
- Do we need to keep the data to uphold our rules and keep our service safe? To help ensure user safety, protect against harmful content on our platform, and take action with reports of intellectual property infringement, we may keep data that has been removed from the Spotify Service for a limited period of time. This helps us investigate potential breaches of our User Guidelines and Platform Rules.
- Is Spotify subject to a legal or contractual obligation to keep or delete the data? Examples include mandatory data retention laws, government orders to preserve data relevant to an investigation or data kept for the purposes of litigation. Conversely, we will remove unlawful content if the law requires us to do so.
Your rights
Privacy laws, including the GDPR, give rights to individuals over their personal data.
Some rights only apply when Spotify uses a certain ‘legal basis’ to process your data. We explain each legal basis, and when Spotify uses each one, in section 4 of our Privacy Policy.
The table below explains:
- your rights
- circumstances when they apply (such as the legal basis required)
- how to use them
| It’s your right to... | How? |
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Be informed | Be informed of the personal data we process about you and how we process it. | We inform you:
by answering your specific questions and requests when you contact us |
Access | Request access to the personal data we process about you. | To request a copy of your personal data from Spotify, either:
For additional information about what data you may request access to, see section ‘Obtaining a copy of your personal data’. |
Rectification | Request that we amend or update your personal data where it’s inaccurate or incomplete. | You can edit your User Data under ‘Edit profile’ in your account or by contacting us. |
Erasure | Request that we erase certain of your personal data. For example, you can ask us to erase personal data:
There are situations where Spotify is unable to delete your data, for example when:
| There are several ways you can erase personal data from Spotify:
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Restriction | Request that we stop processing all or some of your personal data. You can do this if:
You can request that we stop this processing temporarily or permanently. | You can exercise your right to restriction by contacting us. |
Object | Object to us processing your personal data. You can do this if:
| To exercise your right to object:
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Data portability | Request a copy of your personal data in electronic format and the right to transmit that personal data for use in another party’s service. You can request us to transmit your data when we are processing your personal data on the legal basis of consent or performance of contract. However Spotify will try to honour any request to the extent possible. | For information about how to exercise the right to portability, please see ‘Access’ above. |
Not be subject to automated decision making | Not be subject to a decision based solely on automated decision making (decisions without human involvement), including profiling, where the decision would have a legal effect on you or produce a similarly significant effect. | Spotify does not carry out this type of automated decision making in the Spotify Service. |
Withdrawal of consent | Withdraw your consent to us collecting or using your personal data. You can do this if Spotify is processing your personal data on the legal basis of consent. | To withdraw your consent, you can:
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Right to lodge a complaint | Contact the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection or your local data protection authority about any questions or concerns. | You can find the Swedish Authority’s details here, or go to the website of your local data protection authority. |
Information regarding the source of the personal data
In addition to the data we collect from you when you sign up for the Spotify Service, update your account, or throughout your use of the Spotify Service, we may collect certain data from other (‘third party’) sources. The table below sets out the categories of the third parties and a description of them.
Categories of third parties | Description |
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Authentication partners | If you register for or log into our services using another service, we’ll receive your information from them to help create your account with us. |
Third party applications, services and devices you connect to your Spotify account | If you connect your Spotify account to a third party application, service or devices, we may collect and use certain information from them to make the integration possible. These third party apps, services or devices may include:
We’ll ask your permission before we collect your information from certain third parties. |
Technical service partners | We work with technical service partners that give us certain data. This includes mapping IP addresses to non-precise location data (e.g., country or region, city, state). This makes it possible for Spotify to provide the Spotify Service, content, and features. |
Payment partners and Merchants | If you choose to pay through third parties (e.g. telco carriers) or by invoice, we may get data from our payment partners. This allows us to:
If we direct you to a merchant, we receive data from the merchant that is related to your purchase. For example, we might direct you to an artist’s merchandise store on a third party platform or to a third party ticketing website. Receiving this data allows us to:
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Advertising and marketing partners | From certain advertising or marketing partners, we receive inferences (i.e., their understanding) of your interests and preferences. This allows us to deliver more relevant ads and marketing. |
International transfers
Because of the global nature of our business, Spotify shares your personal data internationally with Spotify group companies, subcontractors and partners when carrying out the activities described in our Privacy Policy. They may process your data in countries whose data protection laws are not considered to be as strong as EU laws or the laws which apply where you live. For example, they may not give you the same rights over your data.
Whenever we transfer personal data internationally, we use tools to:
- make sure the data transfer complies with applicable law; and
- help to give your data the same level of protection as it has in the EU
To ensure each data transfer complies with applicable EU legislation, we use the following legal mechanisms:
- Standard Contractual Clauses (‘SCCs’). These clauses require the third party to protect your data and to provide you with EU-level rights and protections. For example, we use SCCs to transfer your personal data to our hosting provider which uses servers in the US. You can exercise your rights under the Standard Contractual Clauses by contacting us or the third party who processes your personal data.
- Adequacy Decisions. This means that we transfer personal data to countries outside of the European Economic Area which have adequate laws to protect personal data, as determined by the European Commission. For example, we transfer your personal data to vendors based in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Republic of Korea and Switzerland.
We also identify and use additional protections as appropriate for each data transfer. For example, we use:
- technical protections, such as encryption and pseudonymisation
- policies and processes to challenge disproportionate or unlawful government authority requests
Obtaining a copy of your personal data
By using our Download your data tool on the Privacy Settings section of your account page, you can download your most relevant personal data. The download will include a copy of the following data (if applicable to you):
- Playlists
- Search queries
- Streaming history for the past year
- A list of items saved in your library
- The number of followers you have and the number of accounts you follow
- Payment and subscription data
- User data
- Inferences
- Voice input
- Podcast interactivity
- Episodes (data relating to podcasts you have created on the Spotify Service)
- Family Plan data
- Spotify for Artists data
In addition to the data available in the Download your data tool, you can contact us to separately request:
- Technical log information that we have collected about your account to provide and troubleshoot the Spotify service
- Extended streaming history for the life of your account
You can also contact us to get all information we hold about you at once, without using the automatic download tool first.
If you have requested a copy of your personal data either via our Download your data tool or through our support team, you should have received an email letting you know that the data is ready for download or will receive one shortly.
Contact us
In providing this information, our goal is for you to understand how your personal data is processed in the Spotify Service and be able to exercise the privacy rights and choices available to you. If we have failed to do that in any way, please contact us! We are happy to explain any of the personal data included in your data download or answer any questions you have about the information we have provided and how it applies to your specific use of the Spotify Service.
The best way to contact us is via email at privacy@spotify.com.
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