[mosselman]

Explain please how it is ABSOLUTELY not. It must be at least a bit, because you can tick off a few from the list of the definitions:

Noun

cash grab ‎(plural cash grabs)

    1. (derogatory) product designed without love or care, with the sole intent of generating profits 
    2. (politics) Legislation that serves primarily the purpose of generating revenue. 
    3. An activity engaged in with the intention of making money quickly.
    4. The money generated by a cash grab. 
    5. A game in which players attempt to grab as much money as possible. 

Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cash_grab

[charlesray]

You're doing exactly what Forbes wants you to do: fear mongering. Privacy policies are legal liability waivers. They are not statements of intent. There is absolutely no indication whatsoever that Spotify is harvesting your data and selling it to third parties to make some money on the side. That is a ridiculous assumption, and you need to provide damn good evidence if you expect me to even begin to consider that.

What any REASONABLE person would assume is that Spotify is simply doing what everyone else does, which is track your usage of their product in order to better target ads.

[LunaSea]

And we all know that if everyone else is doing it it's alright!

The next "reasonable" thing to do is to let them use your phone's camera 24/7 to film your life so that they can get an actually good grasp of your consuming habits.

I'm hyperbolising here of course but this trend of using niche features like syncing your playlist's BPM to your pace as an excuse to track even more data and destroy your user's privacy must stop.