Spotify introduces restrictions on the use of its API by third-party developers. The service will no longer provide access to data on what its users listen to. This was reported by TechCrunch.

“As part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges that many companies navigate today, we’re making changes to our public APIs,” Spotify reports.

The changes are aimed at restricting developers who, in the company’s opinion, abuse its API by extracting data from the platform. The functions that Spotify is withdrawing access to can disclose information about the habits of service users, including artists and songs that different groups listen to most often. This data can be used to create competitive models of artificial intelligence music recommendations that Spotify itself has been developing in recent years.

In addition to Spotify’s song and artist recommendations, third-party developers will also lose access to audio analysis that describes the structure and rhythm of tracks. Spotify has also restricted access to algorithmically generated playlists.

On the Spotify community forum, users expressed dissatisfaction with the music platform’s restriction of access to these features. Some developers used them to create artificial intelligence music recommendations, while others used Spotify analytics to develop their own applications.

“Let’s be real here, this isn’t about security or user privacy, this is about data being used for training AI models,” writes one of the users.

These changes will affect only those developers who have limited access to the API. For official partners, the Spotify API remains available.