Spotify

Is Spotify safe?

Yes, for nearly everyone. Spotify is mostly licensed music from record labels, with little room for the scams and harassment that fill social apps. We score it 58/100, a few points above YouTube (54) and below Duolingo (61).

What holds the score back is not danger to listeners but data and accounts. Spotify's free tier, used by 476 million people at the end of 2025, is paid for by ads that are targeted using your profile. A Swedish court has upheld a GDPRGDPRThe EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which sets rules on how organisations collect and use personal data and allows large fines.More in the glossary fine over how Spotify answers access requests. And there is no two-step login of the kind most banks and email services now offer.

What Spotify knows about you

Your listening history is the core of it: what you play, skip, save and search for, at what time and on which device. Apple's privacy label lists email, phone number, user and device IDs, product interaction and advertising data as used to track you across other companies' apps and websites. Twelve categories are linked to your identity, including health and fitness data, contacts, coarse location and search history.

The privacy policy, effective July 2026, says advertising partners receive account and usage data and send Spotify their own data in return, including hashed contact details and inferences about your interests. Spotify says it does not disclose personal data to ad partners for users under 18. Premium does not switch off data collection, only most of the ads.

The SEK 58 million fine

In June 2023 Sweden's data protection authority, IMY, fined Spotify AB SEK 58 million, about €5 million. The case started with complaints from users in the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark. IMY found that Spotify did hand over people's data when they asked for it, but did not explain clearly enough how it used that data, breaching GDPRGDPRThe EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which sets rules on how organisations collect and use personal data and allows large fines.More in the glossary Articles 12 and 15. IMY rated the breach as low in severity.

Spotify appealed and lost. On 3 June 2025 the Administrative Court of Appeal in Stockholm upheld the fine, saying Spotify had not given the information needed for users to exercise their rights "in a clear and easily accessible way". In a separate case the same court upheld an IMY reprimand in 2024, after Spotify was too slow answering one user's access request and correcting their data.

These are process failures, not leaks. They matter because the right to see your data is how users find out what a company holds.

Accounts, passwords and messages

No major breach of Spotify's own systems is known. Spotify runs a bug bounty and, in its 2025 annual report, lists credential stuffing, scraping and phishing among attacks it has already faced. Credential stuffing means attackers try passwords leaked from other sites, so a reused password is the usual weak point. You can log in with a password or a one-time code, but no authenticator-app two-step login was found.

Messages, launched on 26 August 2025, added private chat for the first time. It is limited to users aged 16 and over in select markets, works through message requests you can accept or reject, and can be switched off in Settings. Spotify says chats are encrypted in transit and at rest, not end to end, and that it scans them for some unlawful and harmful content.

Is Spotify safe for children?

Licensed music is not the problem; user uploads are. Spotify does not check podcasts and videos before they go live. In December 2024 users reported pornographic videos in search results, including one that appeared after a search for the artist M.I.A., and Spotify said it removed the content. The explicit filter depends on labels supplied by rights holders and uploaders, so it misses things.

For children under 13, use Spotify Kids or a managed account on a Premium Family plan, which have their own privacy notices. Teenagers on a standard account cannot use Messages until they are 16.

How to use Spotify more safely

1. Use a unique password, and secure the email account linked to Spotify, since login codes go there.
2. Turn off Tailored Ads in your account's Privacy settings.
3. Use a private session for listening you do not want shaping your recommendations or visible to followers.
4. Check Settings for social features: hide recently played artists and turn off Messages if you do not use it.
5. Treat emails about "payment problems" with suspicion. Log in through the app, not a link.

How we scored it

Content safety (72) and regulatory record (70) are Spotify's stronger factors: mostly licensed content, and one moderate GDPRGDPRThe EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which sets rules on how organisations collect and use personal data and allows large fines.More in the glossary fine plus a reprimand. Privacy (42) is the weakest, because free listeners are profiled and tracked for third-party ads. Security (58) reflects a clean breach record but no two-step login, which leaves accounts exposed to reused passwords.