this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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What threat model includes "malicious actor can see my taste in music"?
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:
These are just the things I can tyink of off the top of my head, and I'm not in infosec.
They're gonna datamine way more than that on the fediverse but yeah sure.
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.
All of that info is already available for anyone who has a government ID or census record
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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.
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Those are pretty terrible examples.
They sell (sold?) the recommendation API. When you scrobble, last.fm got to build a corpus of data they could make recommendations from.
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).
The day my government arrests me for listening to furry speedcore is the day I'll eat my socks, man
Yeah, it's great to be safe in your country. I enjoy it too, fortunately. But it's not the same everywhere.
In quite a few countries some genres of music are actually illegal. Nazi music in France, most of western music in Iran, ...