Spotify announces private listening mode
(CBS) - Fact: not everyone is cool 100 percent of the time. So when Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify chief executive officer Daniel Ek announced that music streaming would be broadcast to Facebook friends, we were terrified!
Now, all of our friends could see everything we listen to throughout the day. No more embarrassing pop playlists. Forget about afternoon Justin Bieber dance parties.
Users were up in arms over the invasion of privacy - if you can call it that. After all, you could just opt out of sharing. Add in the fact that new users had to sign up with a Facebook account and the outcry intensified.
Thankfully, the Spotify team is extending an olive branch to those of us who are extroverted enough to share our playlist, but embarrassed by our spotty taste in music.
"We're rolling out a new client as we speak where you can temporarily hide your guilty pleasures. It works like a browsers private mode," Ek tweeted yesterday.
What exactly does "temporarily" mean?
"Temporarily means that it works for this session. If you want to turn it off completely you can do so in preferences," Ek tweeted later.
If the roll-out has reached you, there will be a notification for a software update when you launch Spotify today. To use private listening, go to the File menu and the option is now available.
In a perfect world, we'd all be as sophisticated as Audrey Hepburn with Sofia Coppola's taste in music. Let's face reality, people. We'll never be that awesome. At least you can hide that fact from your Facebook friends now. Go forth and build your Back Street Boys playlist again! No one has to know.
