How to stop Spotify shaming you on Facebook

Barry Collins Read more April 27, 2010

If you’ve got friends on Spotify, your Facebook homepage probably looks something like the screenshot above this morning. This is because Spotify has just upgraded its software with a battery of social-networking features, and has taken the rather obnoxious decision to make everything you do public by default.

How to stop Spotify shaming you on Facebook

If you don’t want to be responsible for cluttering up your friends’ Facebook pages with inane announcements, or let the world know about your Barbara Streisand Greatest Hits playlist, here’s how to protect your privacy:

Once you’ve installed the Spotify 0.4.3 software, you’ll be presented with a wizard that first asks whether you want to access your local music collection through Spotify and will then ask whether you want to connect to Facebook. Log in to your Facebook account, and then when it asks if you want to change your sharing options, click the Edit button.

You’ll see a screen something like the one below:

You’ll notice that everything is conveniently ticked to go public, including your lists of “top artists” and “top tracks”, which is seemingly nothing more than a list of recently played tracks and, in my case, rather embarrassingly includes Donovan and The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Thanks Spotify. If you don’t want to spend the next six months living down your choice of music, flick the switches to the “off” position on the desired lists and they won’t be shared with your pals.

However, Spotify will still continue to spit out alerts to your Facebook friends every time you do something like subscribing to a friend’s playlist. To stop this irritating nonsense, you need to track down an option that’s rather tucked away. In the People Pane on the right-hand side of the screen, click the little cog icon and select Disable Posting to Facebook.