Friday, January 13, 2017

Question for those who know European privacy law

Is this ad campaign for Spotify a problem?
"Dear person in the Theater District who listened to the Hamilton soundtrack 5,376 times this year, can you get us tickets?"
and
"Dear person who played 'Sorry' 42 times on Valentine's Day, What did you do?"
Bonus: if these aren't actual Spotify customers, is this false advertising?  (By my calculations, you couldn't listen to the full Hamilton soundtrack 5,376 times in one year.  Maybe if you listened to mostly Act I, to avoid too much gross sobbing.)

1 comment:

Eric Brunner-Williams said...

i contributed to the w3c's p3p spec. my autistic son jonah, and others with similar perseverate behaviors for similar forms of media, replay local sources and internet delivered data streams (audio and video) hundreds of times, and are trivially identifiable in any reasonable data set. so yes, there is sufficient pii to locate individual persons in replay data, and yes, the european human rights framework (not the american contractual right framework, or the oedc hybrid framework), which is "aware" of past human rights abuses, including extermination policies by nation states for handicapped persons, has the intent of protecting handicapped persons from unintentional disclosure of pii.

the spotify adverts, supra, announce to those with perseverative behaviors, and their care takers, that spotify does, and others with access to the same data sets, track them, and discloses their locations of preference.

there are two other issues perhaps more important:

1, the access network operator's pricing for data to handicapped persons with perseverative behaviors. after getting public right of way to deliver eyeballs to their content vendors, advertisers included, is there a duty to recognize the handicap, or does the neuro-typical pay-to-play regime have no exceptions?

2, the content vendors, intellectual property managers generally, and replay, and co-play, for handicapped persons with perseverative behaviors. after getting public protection for their creative works (with or without drm), is there a duty to recognize the handicap, or does the neuro-typical pay-to-play regime have no exceptions? this may be a little less obvious than 1, supra. thousands of youtube segments exist, hundreds more each week, of kids imitating (for a variety of reasons, language acquisition for echololia affected individuals being one) or "reading along" with copyrighted content. does "fair use" include the handicapped kid uploading some timon & pumba (disney ipr) segment with singing or humming or just breathing sounds, many, many, many times, over and over and over?

thanks for asking about the spotify advert in a eu context.