Spotify activity revealed for celebrities, politicians, exposing privacy faults

Spotify has always had a bent toward social sharing and keeping music activity public. Now, a new website called Panama Playlists has exposed the service’s privacy gaps by revealing Spotify playback activity, playlists, and more for various celebrities—including tech leaders, politicians, and more.

Panama Playlists exposes Spotify’s privacy shortcomings

Do you know what your Spotify privacy settings are? That’s the question being prompted by a new website.

As highlighted by The Verge, Panama Playlists includes a variety of Spotify data from users like:

• J.D. Vance, the U.S. Vice President
• Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO
• Seth Meyers, comedian
• Mike Johnson, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
• Al Roker, NBC

Here’s a quote from the site’s anonymous creator:

I found the real Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians, and journalists. Many use their real names. With a little sleuthing, I could say with near-certainty: yep, this is them.

We’ve been scraping their accounts since summer 2024. Playlists, live listening feed, everything. I know what songs they played, when, and how many times.

This isn’t technically a data leak, since presumably all of the information was accessed publicly. Ultimately though, it seems that the information is accurate.

The Verge’s piece mentions how several of the people they reached out to seemed surprised by their own lackluster Spotify privacy settings. Elizabeth Lopatto explains at The Verge:

This website is possible because Spotify’s design assumes everyone wants to share everything with the entire world and makes it difficult for users to protect their privacy. It defaults to making all playlists and profiles public. To change that, users need to go to the “Privacy and social” menu and toggle the “Public playlists” setting to private. However, that won’t retroactively make playlists private; instead, you’ll have to do all that by hand on each individual playlist.

So if you’re a Spotify user, it’s probably a good day to check those privacy settings to ensure they’re what you thought.

Or there’s always Apple Music, which—in my estimation at least—is significantly more strict about the privacy of your listening data.

Does ‘Panama Playlists’ give you any hesitation about using Spotify? Let us know in the comments.

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