Spotify’s new DMs feature lets random people message you

Last week, Spotify rolled out a new DMs feature to select free and Premium users.

Right away, some questioned why a music streaming app even needs such social media-esque functionality. Now, even more people are coming out against Spotify DMs after they discovered that the feature even allows random people to message you.

That’s because the feature is supposed to only allow you to message people you’ve interacted with before. But as some people, including Reddit user sporoni122 have pointed out, the app is listing some “suggested friends” under the Spotify Messages tab that they did not recognize. The user eventually realized that these are people with whom they shared music on Spotify in the past. This means that people who have access to that shared link could, in theory, trace it back to the original poster, even if they’re strangers.

As Android Authority notes, you can bypass URL tracking by removing the query parameter — it’s the “?” in the link. There are also third-party sites like LinkCleaner to scrub them.

URL tracking is obviously not exclusive to Spotify, but it’s certainly a different thing entirely when it’s tied to social features like this.

Via: Android Authority