Spotify exposed: Private listening habits of politicians, journalists and tech bros leaked in a privacy meltdown
Spotify just leaked private playlists of famous people, and your personal music could be exposed too because of Spotify’s broken privacy settings.
Spotify is an awesome service, but its default privacy settings are a joke. In a truly pathetic display of how little the platform respects user privacy, a new website called Panama Playlists has managed to leak Spotify playlists and listening habits of various celebrities, including tech leaders, politicians and many others.
“I found the real Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians and journalists. Many use their real names,” wrote the site’s anonymous creator. “With a little sleuthing, I could say with near-certainty: yep, this is them.”
Spotify privacy leak exposes playlists of famous people
It’s especially worrisome that they’ve been scraping these accounts since summer 2024, thanks to Spotify’s privacy shortcomings. The leaked stuff includes playlists, live listening feed and more. “I know what songs they played, when and how many times,” the site’s creator noted.
The Verge reports that Panama Playlists exposes Spotify playback data of celebrities, politicians and technology leaders like US Vice President J.D. Vance, Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, comedian and Late Night host Seth Meyers and NBC’s weather presenter Al Roker, among others.
“Among the notables are Vice President JD Vance—whose ‘Making Dinner’ playlist features ‘I Want It That Way’ by the Backstreet Boys and ‘One Time’ by Justin Bieber,” writes the publication. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had his private playlist leaked to a random user. Some of the affected people told The Verge that they couldn’t recognize their leaked playlists.
I can confirm that this playlist is real.
My life
Would suck
Without
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) July 30, 2025
This seems to be a systemic design failure instead of a one-off glitch. Spotify seems to treat your personal data like public property unless you jump through its hidden settings maze. By default, Spotify sets all user playlists and profiles to be publicly viewable by other Spotify users unless you state otherwise.
To fix it, go to the “Privacy and social” menu and toggle the “Public playlists” setting to private. This will have an effect on newly created playlists; for existing ones, you’ll have to set them to private by hand on each individual playlist. Also, keep in mind that your Spotify profile name and photo are always visible to any Spotify user you haven’t blocked, and there’s no way around that.
If you’re concerned about how Spotify is handling your privacy, you can always try Apple Music, which doesn’t expose any of your playlists by default and doesn’t try to shove social features down your throat. Apple Music also features a built-in tool to transfer your playlist from Spotify and other music services.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/07/31/spotify-playlist-leak-privacy/
