Best Privacy Practice Recommendations for Global Audio Streaming Platforms

TL;DR

This paper provides best privacy practice recommendations for global audio streaming platforms like Spoon Radio, focusing on data lifecycle stages and content moderation to enhance privacy and compliance across regions.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive set of privacy best practices tailored for audio streaming platforms, combining current implementations with aspirational guidelines for future improvement.

Findings

Best practices organized around data collection, storage, usage, and destruction.

Recommendations include privacy measures for content moderation and cultural considerations.

Guidelines help platforms anticipate regulatory changes and user expectations.

Abstract

Spoon Radio is a rapidly growing global audio streaming platform which currently operates in South Korea, the United States, Japan as well as the Middle East and North Africa. The platform believes that its commitment to user privacy is an important competitive factor. As such, it aims to not just comply with existing privacy regulations in regions where it operates today but to also ensure that it anticipates likely evolution to these regulations and of user expectations. In doing so, Spoon Radio wants to ensure it is well prepared to continue its expansion into new markets. As part of an effort to inform the evolution of its data practices, Spoon Radio reached out to the Privacy Engineering Program at CMU and sponsored a capstone project in which two master's students in the Program worked with Spoon Radio personnel over the course of the 2021 Fall Semester. The present report summarizes best practice recommendations that have emerged from this collaboration. These best practices are a combination of practices that are already implemented or in the process of being implemented by Spoon Radio today as well as more aspirational recommendations, which are expected to help inform Spoon Radio's practices in the future. In this report, best practice recommendations are organized around four stages of the data life cycle: data collection, data storage, data usage, and finally data destruction. A separate section is devoted to content moderation, an area where platforms such as Spoon Radio need to reconcile considerations such as promoting freedom of expression with the need to create a safe and respectful environment that complies with applicable laws and respects relevant cultural values.