Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR A website called Panama Playlists claims to have exposed the Spotify listening habits of politicians, tech CEOs, celebrities, and journalists by tracking their public playlists and listening activity.
The leak reveals the personal music choices of some of the world’s most powerful people, including US Vice President JD Vance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, United States Attorney General Pam Bondi, and others.
The site highlights a big flaw in how Spotify handles the privacy of its users.
Turns out Spotify isn’t just a music streaming app anymore. It’s also a window into the music listening habits and private jam sessions of politicians, tech CEOs, journalists, that one guy you saw on cable news, and many others.
Thanks to a new website called Panama Playlists, anyone can now get a glimpse into what some very famous people are actually listening to on Spotify. From JD Vance cooking to Justin Bieber, to OpenAI’s Sam Altman grooving to The Weekend, this playlist leak may be fun to browse, but it should also have you worried for your privacy.
The creators of Panama Playlists say they’ve been quietly stalking public Spotify accounts since summer 2024. They scraped the listening history, public playlists, even what song someone played and when. They then matched playlists and user names to real-life identities, all because of Spotify’s questionable privacy rules. And in case you’re wondering why the site is called Panama Playlists, it’s a cheeky nod to the Panama Papers, which was a leak of thousands of offshore bank accounts.
What caused this? By default, every playlist you make on Spotify is public, and so is your profile. If you want privacy, you have to dig through settings and toggle off the “Public playlists” option, which would prevent new playlists you make from being publicly visible. Sadly, if you’re hurrying to change this right now, know that it won’t affect your older playlists. You’ll need to manually lock down each playlist you created before changing the setting if you want to make it private.
Since many people signed up for Spotify with their Facebook accounts, their real names are also on the platform. This is how we ended up here, with the playlists and music choices of some of the most well-known people in the world exposed for everyone to see.
Who’s listening to what?
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