Basically, my entire system is FOSS but I’m tempted to install the Spotify .deb package. Would that give Spotify access to info about my system?
Just use it as a PWA from a Chromium browser. I run Spotify as a PWA in Brave and get free, ad-free music. It’s the ideal way, IMO. Then again, I only use Spotify for discovery. I buy my CDs and Bandcamp albums, I will always prefer ownership over streaming.
I cant answer your question, but you could just use the webplayer.
Standard Debian packages have access to things like your home folder and other things that can be accessed without superuser level access. If you’re not okay with that, don’t install it.
If a flatpak package is available, it can have it’s permissions controlled by Flatseal, allowing you to restrict Spotify’s permissions.
Flatpaks do better sandboxing. So better then .deb’s, but not better then using a web browser
If you’re overriding the default permissions… Flatpaks attempt to sandbox applications not built to work in a sandbox so the packages usually come with lots of holes prepunched that you probably can close without issues.
than*
Just use Spotifys web interface.
Thanks, I think psst will be it
I’m sure Spotify collects data on the running system, similar to the Steam hardware survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
They use that data to make decisions about how to develop their product. Does that make it unsafe to you?
Either use flatpak or the web app I guess?
Everyone hates snaps but a sandboxed snap also exists in addition to a flatpak.
I am mostly saying this simply to annoy people.
Why not just use the web app?
The web app is (deliberately) limited in comparison to the desktop app.
The only limitation I’ve seen is the inability to download for offline listening. Other than that, especially on Brave, I get fully ad-free listening without any issues aside from a couple seconds of pause in between where the ad breaks used to be.
Ah, well I wasn’t able to add to a group playlist in the web app.
Maybe it’s not as bad as I thought, idk.
Group playlist? I’ve never used that feature, but I know you can add things to playlists on the web version, and you can make those playlists public as far as I know.
buy your music
You can run it in a vm 🤷♀️
On Linux, all unsandboxed apps are allowed to do anything your user account can do (without sudo) - there is no permission model. You could use Flatpaks but they’re not perfect, likely would require customizing with Flatseal.
So that’s like, reading all documents, writing stuff, and I assume it can also make outbound connections to servers?
Yep. Anything you could do on the terminal without typing a password.
*without SELinux
But it’s a pain to set up and I hate it
Not answering your question directly but have you heard of Nuclear Music Player? It searches the Spotify API for track names and plays them from Youtube.
If you want to make sure your system stays 100% healthy do not try to install proprietary software on your Linux :)
