Apps doing year wrapped gives you a hint on how are you being tracked. There is probably a legal issue there somewhere like data retention.

shastaxc

If they did that it would be far too easy for people to boost listens and ratings with bots

Fonzie!

The only software that could do that for me was Steam; saying when I played which games how long, and if it appeared to be on a Steam Deck or not. It did not nearly track all the Deck data, it seems if the Deck has no Internet connection for long enough it kind of just discards data it held and it never gets synced to Steam. For my desktop it was accurate, but only the game time stats it already let me know it tracks.

Since nothing else could “wrap” my annual data I think I'm going fine.

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Just to add on, it's not just they let you export data in a cool PDF, it also lets you export the data as a CSV so it can be parsed by other things.

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Which apps do that? None of mind have suggested anything.

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I'm aware of spotify, youtube, and to a lesser extent strava and duolingo.

I don't use either one of them, but people have posted screenshots from all those on social media.

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Yeah, I try not to install apps from major companies and use 3rd party when possible. O always just assume that those are tracking you even if they say they aren't

Justin

the difference is that mp3 players didn't upload all that information to an American datacenter. Also tracking times of day, building profiles on listeners, etc.

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Yep, if there's a third party app available I'll take those instead, or for the likes of spotify I just download my music for offline playback. Not a fan of streaming in general, I'm a big proponent of file ownership. A bit different for youtube videos that I treat as disposable (consume it once and likely never again), but for music and movies, I need to hold on to the files. Even if I got legitimate access through Netflix or Prime, if it's good, I'll download a copy for archiving purposes.

For other apps I'll try to get a FOSS alternative or if that fails (or is butt ugly) I'll go with a small dev on google play instead.

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Antenna-Pod does it this way as well.

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I just use Grayjay for youtube.

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But "wrapped" type things aren't using button press telemetry. They're using data that the user wants access to anyways, like their Spotify play history, or Duolingo lesson progress.

It doesn't even make sense to anonymize that data because people want to see their play history, not what was popular last week.

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They need that assigned to specific use accounts so that people can look at their play history. A thing that people often want to do with their music players.

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I doubt it.

The kind of data used for "wrapped" type summaries are usually the kind of data that users want to be tracked because it powers features they want.

Like Spotify wrapped is based of Spotify play history, and being able to see your recently played songs is a feature people want.

Duolingo wrapped is based on lesson progress, and it has to track your progress else it doesn't know what lesson you're doing.

idk what other apps do this, it's pretty rare for me, but afaict it's all just normal stuff.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of privacy problems that apps try to fuck with, but I don't think that yearly wrapped is likely to be one of them.

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Newpipe for me. On desktop I use the plain old website, but with adblock, sponsorblock and all other privacy enabling plugins, and of course on Firefox.

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My to do list app had a wrapped and I was deeply displeased to see it.

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Yeah I don't mind apps keeping track of how I've been using them. But if duolingo tells me where my friend got married and congratulates me on keeping my streak through that then we're gonna have some concerns

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I actually have both installed, but I like how I can have different services with Grayjay.

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Lucy does keep saying that she is always listening rather ominously

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I actually wish services like Spotify or Apple Music did a better job of displaying this data throughout the year rather than just in end of year infographics.

Preach

Spotify > Search > Made For You > “On Repeat” / “Repeat Rewind” = not sufficient

Chad Google Play Music > sort by plays = perfect

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The whole 'wrapped' summaries thing dovetails perfectly into social media narcissism. It's quite a spectacle to witness.