Privacy with Roon & Qobuz - Search & Roon Radio

Two quick curiosity-driven privacy related questions that I didn’t see anywhere else…

  1. In Roon, by default when you search it now also searches Qobuz. Does this mean Qobuz now knows all of my searches, because they are being passed to it by Roon?

Roon searches don’t seem to show up in my Qobuz search history, but I’m not sure how this would work otherwise.

  1. Roon radio now uses the cloud/AI to help determine the next track. Our feedback is used to improve the algorithm. Does Roon tie this feedback to an individual? Meaning, does Roon store our feedback (and therefore what music we’re playing) anywhere in a manner that is tied to PII (personally identifiable information)?

Anyone know?

Vog

Using Roon means giving up most of your privacy.
There is no way to opt-out of tracking.
http://kb.roonlabs.com/Privacy_Policy

Hi @Vog,

This is question for @support so I’ve moved it over to this category.

From a technical point of view it is not necessary to pass on your PII to qobuz for a search you do inside the Roon app. It would be sufficient if both Roonlabs and Xandrie know you’re entitled to get search results from qobuz - that can be done “easily” with some kind of a proxy solution.

Since neither the privacy policy mentioned above nor the T&C state otherwise – actually Xandrie / qobuz aren’t in there at all – consumers which enjoy good data protection laws should be safe. Otherwise Roonlabs wouldn’t do what they say but why should they, especially since being “privacy freaks” themselves. :wink:

According to the Privacy Policy that should be analytical data which is not tied to and therefore not processed and stored together with PII. I believe if it wouldn’t be so there’d by quite some administrative effort required to comply with varying data protection laws, something that’s better invested into features. Personally. I’d prefer a situation which for instance wouldn’t require a DPO at all to comply with the GDPR. :sunglasses:

Thanks, u_gee. What you say makes sense, and is technically clearly a way they could have architected it. It would be nice to have someone from the Roon team confirm what they’ve done.

@support - can you confirm u_gee’s educated guesses? Also, note that you should probably update Roon’s privacy policy to include Qobuz and not just Tidal…

Thanks,

Vog

Roon operates its own search indexes, which are populated with bulk dumps of Qobuz’s full catalog daily, so searches performed in Roon terminate within our infrastructure and Qobuz is not made aware of them.

I am going to refer back to the the privacy policy to answer this.

The privacy policy addresses where personal information is held:

  • Your personal information (name, email address, password) is stored securely in our account database and is never shared with our partners or other third parties.

To clarify–the account database is a separate database from our machine learning systems with separate access controls. People working on machine learning systems do not come into contact with personal information in the course of that work.

The privacy policy also addresses radio and the concept of “taste profiles”:

For the development of radio and other features, Roon builds musical taste profiles based on your play history.

To clarify–this taste profile is linked to an opaque identifier and is not stored or processed alongside personal information, as @anon47919701 guessed.

Disclaimer: I am not a Lawyer. The Privacy Policy is the official source of information on these topics.

@brian - thanks as always for the clear answer. Another reason why I’m a promoter of Roon.

Have a great weekend,

Vog

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