I love digging into stats as much as the next person; initiatives like Spotify Wrapped give a fun insight into the year that was and how your tastes align with your friends’. But behind cutesy social media campaigns built on mass data collection is a darker undercurrent about how much we’re willing to share with large corporations.
Putting aside the complaints about the quality of this year’s AI-driven Spotify Wrapped for one moment, there’s a strange dissonance about our seemingly collective comfort in sharing our data for entertainment purposes.
It’s not just for music streaming platforms; video game companies also generate shareable infographics about your gaming habits, like the Xbox Year in Review. Bioware, the developers behind Dragon Age: The Veilguard, just revealed a swathe of statistics collected from millions of players, including the all-important most popular romanceable character.
Why care about Spotify Wrapped and surveillance?
Spotify Wrapped has entered the cultural mainstream as an annual event people look forward to. Look on your socials today and you’ll see post after post about everyone’s favourite artists. Or in my case, the sheepish admission that U2 ranked first once again in my considerably more boring Apple Music Replay summary. Mass corporate surveillance is being rebranded and we’re all gleefully celebrating it.
It wasn’t something I thought about too deeply until I stumbled across an academic paper “Normalizing player surveillance through video game infographics” a couple of years ago. Written by Jan Švelch, a game production researcher in Prague, the article explores how game companies normalise player surveillance by presenting data in a seemingly harmless context.
Additional research has also argued that video games need to be scrutinised as much as social media platforms from a privacy perspective. The same argument could be made for music streaming services. Companies don’t harvest our information just to repackage it in a stylised 16:9 graphic for our enjoyment. Data helps inform business decisions to help companies make even more money.
We all consent to this large-scale data collection when we agree to the terms and conditions most of us don’t read. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be mindful of what companies are really doing when they say we’re in our “pink pilates strut pop phase”.
Will I stop using all of the products and services behind the mass collection of data? No, of course not. I’d have to forgo nearly every form of technology to do so. Let’s at least be aware of what’s happening when our data is shown to us in a way manufactured to go viral.
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