From a privacy standpoint, i guess. I want to support open scrobbling with listenbrainz and the account isn’t directly linked to a real acc. Why shouldn’t I/ why don’t you?
But when I log in via my Musicbrainz account it just loads indefinitely. Seems to be a bug with some server cache on their side at least someone said so in the forum. Maybe it works with another account.
If you listen to X and there is another guy listening to X and Y, one could recommend Y to you. Not only that, you actually have an influence which artist is at the top. You get a database of your listens and anyone, including you, can have a look at mass audio scrobble data.
Social engineering. The more information they have about you, the easier you are to immitate.
The threat isn’t in any one piece of information about you; it’s in the corpus of knowledge, the profile they can build. Your tastes in music - at the granularity of not only what you listen to, but how much, and at what times - can help narrow down:
how old you are
where (in the world, and maybe to the time zone) you live
your mother tongue
probably your socio-economic status
These are just the things I can tyink of off the top of my head, and I’m not in infosec.
Depends on how much you let them link it back to you, but you’re absolutely right: social media is a privacy nightmare. It can be mitigated; pick a Lemmy instance that doesn’t require an email, and don’t give out any identifying information, or just lurk. Many of us have multiple accounts on different servers, with carefully segregated personas. You do what you can; OP asked why (or why not) scrob. I see no reason to give out that information, only to give a company more information they can sell.
Because music charts are valuable because the music industry is valuable? They give me free access to their API and they get to scrape the data. It’s not incriminating data, it’s not GPS data. It is, at best, an unreliable indicator of when I am awake.
In totalitarian countries, those who listen to certain types of music are persecuted, because it links them with demografic that can be threatening to the regime. Even if your country is not totalitarian now, the existence of this data could be potentionally harmful to you in the future (just like any data, really).
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