{"id":181728,"date":"2025-07-31T11:07:02","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T15:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/?p=181728"},"modified":"2025-07-31T11:07:02","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T15:07:02","slug":"spotify-exposed-private-listening-habits-of-politicians-journalists-and-tech-bros-leaked-in-a-privacy-meltdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/spotify-exposed-private-listening-habits-of-politicians-journalists-and-tech-bros-leaked-in-a-privacy-meltdown\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotify exposed: Private listening habits of politicians, journalists and tech bros leaked in a privacy meltdown"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Spotify just leaked private playlists of famous people, and your personal music could be exposed too because of Spotify\u2019s broken privacy settings.
<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n

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<\/a> has managed to leak Spotify playlists and listening habits of various celebrities, including tech leaders, politicians and many others.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found the real Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians and journalists. Many use their real names,\u201d wrote the site\u2019s anonymous creator. \u201cWith a little sleuthing, I could say with near-certainty: yep, this is them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spotify privacy leak exposes playlists of famous people<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s especially worrisome that they\u2019ve been scraping these accounts since summer 2024, thanks to Spotify’s privacy shortcomings. The leaked stuff includes playlists, live listening feed and more. \u201cI know what songs they played, when and how many times,\u201d the site\u2019s creator noted.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/figure>\n

The Verge<\/em><\/a> 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\u2019s weather presenter Al Roker, among others.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmong the notables are Vice President JD Vance\u2014whose \u2018Making Dinner\u2019 playlist features \u2018I Want It That Way\u2019 by the Backstreet Boys and \u2018One Time\u2019 by Justin Bieber,\u201d writes the publication. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had his private playlist leaked to a random user. Some of the affected people told The Verge<\/em> that they couldn\u2019t recognize their leaked playlists.<\/p>\n

\n

I can confirm that this playlist is real.<\/p>\n

My life<\/p>\n

Would suck<\/p>\n

Without <\/p>\n

You https:\/\/t.co\/Qm7RJP7Ea9<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) July 30, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

To fix it, go to the \u201cPrivacy and social\u201d menu and toggle the \u201cPublic playlists\u201d 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\u2019s no way around that.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re concerned about how Spotify is handling your privacy, you can always try Apple Music, which doesn\u2019t expose any of your playlists by default and doesn\u2019t try to shove social features down your throat. Apple Music also features a built-in tool<\/a> to transfer your playlist from Spotify and other music services.<\/p>\n

Source link: https:\/\/www.idownloadblog.com\/2025\/07\/31\/spotify-playlist-leak-privacy\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spotify just leaked private playlists of famous people, and your personal music could be exposed too because of Spotify\u2019s 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":32045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-allnews","category-appleindustrynews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181729,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181728\/revisions\/181729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}