In what is shaping up to be a widespread privacy controversy, Spotify has come under intense scrutiny following allegations by users that the music streaming service made their playlists public. private without their consent.

This situation is reminiscent of a similar issue reported in March, raising concerns about a possible pattern of an ongoing privacy issue.

The controversy started when users reported the unexpected change on Twitter and Spotify community forums.

“Apparently @SpotifyUSA silently made all of my private playlists public without my consent. Same thing happened to my wife too,” tweeted Microsoft Edge Project Manager William Devereux.

“This is an absolutely unacceptable breach of privacy. Has anyone else noticed this lately? I haven’t changed any privacy settings.”

There are similar reports on The Spotify forum in March, with one of the affected users being a music curator who uses Spotify professionally.

“Reviewed some lists made about a month ago and they’re all public now. Watching more and they’re now public too!” the user wrote on Spotify’s forums.

“Why did this happen? Is there a way to make mass lists private? I don’t want to spend days of my life changing them one by one, there are over 1400 lists and I can’t not charge for that time, so it may take away from wages.”

Last March, a user offered a theory stating, “The actual parameters of our playlists have not changed. What used to be known as ‘private’ and ‘public’ playlists are now all called “public” because they weren’t actually private before, because they could be shared via a link.”

The theory further suggested a new level of truly private playlists that others could not access even with a link and only playlists marked as “on profile” could be found via search or in the “Discovery” section. on” artist pages.

Despite the theory, Spotify users insist their recent experiences point to a different problem. They claim that their playlists were initially marked as private when created and were inexplicably made public without their knowledge or permission.

In response to the March reports, a Spotify moderator said, “Spotify does not make such bulk changes and will not change your personal collection/account settings unless you explicitly request it… “.

However, this has done little to allay user concerns, and it remains unclear whether the two issues are related or entirely separate incidents.

We have contacted Spotify about these reports, but have not received a response at the time of this publication.