Spotify failed to respond to the coalition letter by the May 18 deadline. Access Now will continue to pressure Spotify and other companies that develop voice-recognition technologies to not invest in or deploy digital tools that violate human rights...

[On 4 May 2021, a coalition]... sent a letter to Spotify calling on the company to make a public commitment to never use, license, sell, or monetize its new speech-recognition patent technology.

Spotify claims that the technology can detect, among other things, “emotional state, gender, age, or accent” to recommend music. This technology is dangerous, a violation of privacy and other human rights...

On April 2, 2021, Access Now sent a letter to Spotify calling on the company to abandon the technology in the patent. On April 15, 2021, Spotify replied... stating that the company “has never implemented the technology described in the patent in any of our products and we have no plans to do so.”...