Does Roon make user data available to other firms or entities?

Just wondering if Roon sells or gives user/subscriber data to other parties, private, business or governmental.

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Have a look at roon’s privacy policy:

Privacy

They do not share PII (Personally Identifiable Information)

Many companies state they don’t share “personally identifiable information”, which is true on a technicality. As presented it’s not inclusive of actual name, address, phone number, etc. However often time’s that’s dancing around reality. It may include IP addresses, other pattern or system information that, on it’s own, is not personally identifiable, but when included with other data that the same aggregate bulk data purchasers also purchase/obtain, it’s easily very identifiable. Thus company A sells “non-identifiable information”, company B sells “non-identifiable information”, and company C buys the information from both, puts them both together, and now they know what you ate for breakfast and how long you spent eating it, and that you have a serious Coltrane fetish.

Who knows what Roon does or doesn’t sell, but when dealing with any cloud service, always assume whatever information you offer can be identifiable and sold, even if it’s not bundled specifically as “user x listened to these tracks during x time.” Regardless of what the legal wording in a privacy policy says.

Heck, every Google privacy policy proudly announces they don’t collect personally identifiable information, despite that being their entire business. Legally it’s true. It’s only personally identifiable when you connect the 10 different non-identifiable points of data together. Which they do, in real-time. :wink:

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They only data a we share is region-based data (at most, country level), for copyright licensing purposes of metadata, lyrics, etc

We do not share any data that could personally identify you. For example no IP addresses are shared.

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Thanks for chiming in, that’s great information! And to be honest, surprising. I simply assumed user data was a revenue stream. I’ve no doubt it is for the streaming services’ own clients (and is part of the reason they’re so protective of said clients and not keen on integrating with third parties.)

Thank you Danny for sharing this information with us. Assuming that the requirements for licensing differ from country to country I am wondering whether the metadata provided by roon also differs from country to country. E.g. lyrics are available in for roon usesrs in country A but not in country B.

I do think it would be interesting if Roon could compile top 20 lists from all users playback and see what people are listening to. I know the streaming companies do this, however, the Roon list could include all sources including attached nas music.

Roon can scrobble to LastFM and participating users can provide others with their usernames and compare listening choices. Personally I am more interested in what individuals listen to, rather than a compilation across all users.

At the moment user choices are used to refine Radio picks. Brian told us this would improve with time as data accumulated; I have been very pleased with some recent Radio journeys, but can’t be sure this was because of contributions from user choices.

The continuing popularity of the “What are we listening to ?” thread demonstrates the interest Roon users have in the music choices of other Roon users. I hope that this can one day make its way into the product rather than just the Forum.

Hey Danny,

but you still use google-analytics on the entire website, also in the Log-In page. So google does have the credentials of all the user base, including ip adresses etc.
I am technically not well-versed as to what alternatives are out there, and cannot give any recommendations for more privacy-friendly analytics for your website, but I do know google is the worst.
So if you took privacy seriously I would very much appreciate if you could get rid of the goggles that are watching us all.
Thanks

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