I wish that Pandora Internet radio made it a little more obvious that you’ve got to adjust your profile options if you don’t want the whole world to know what you listen to. Somebody showed me the new people search engine Spock the other day, and so of course I looked myself up. And there it was, everything I subscribe to on Pandora.
It’s not like I’m ashamed of my music choices. Yup, I like Bartok, Kabalevsky, Shostakovitch, Busoni, Bruckner, and Faure – deal with it. But one can definitely see scenarios where people would like to keep their tastes private, especially if there are crucial portions of their identity/sexuality about which they have safety concerns.
In fairness, Pandora does let you make your profile private. Just go to “account” and “profile,” and down at the bottom of the page there’s a check box that let’s you do just that. It would probably be asking too much to make privacy an opt-in choice, rather than default opt-out, since social networking is a big part of the site’s draw. But I hope the service eventually makes the privacy preference far more obvious from the getgo.
