The Great Celebrity Spotify Playlist Hack
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The playlists of dozens of high-level government officials and tech executives were suddenly broadcast to the world on a website called “the Panama Playlists.” But the information wasn’t taken by sophisticated hackers infiltrating any mainframes—it was all already publicly available.
Guest: Mike Isaac, New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is presented by eBay. |
| 0:03.7 | Rob, everyone loves a deal and a bargain from time to time, don't they? |
| 0:07.8 | Absolutely, mate. And do you know where you can grab a great deal? Talk to me. Where? |
| 0:11.9 | The eBay app. Yes, you are correct. You didn't need to talk to me. I already knew it. I love eBay. |
| 0:17.2 | When you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. There's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else. Then when you're selling, it's so simple and most |
| 0:25.9 | importantly, free. It's free, Rob. When it's this easy to sell for free and there's great deals |
| 0:31.6 | on things you love. You can't help but say when it's eBay. It excludes vehicles and business |
| 0:35.9 | sellers. There are some things you should |
| 0:39.1 | always check, like the hygiene rating on your local takeaway, the setting on your razor, and whether |
| 0:45.9 | the party actually is fancy dress. The other thing you should check is your Experian credit report, |
| 0:52.6 | especially if you're looking to borrow money. It lets you understand |
| 0:56.1 | what lenders see so you can increase your chances of getting the best deals. It's dead easy to check it |
| 1:02.0 | and completely free. See it in seconds. Download the Experian app today. |
| 1:18.6 | About a month ago, Mike Isaac, a tech reporter at the New York Times, received a strange message on his phone. |
| 1:20.5 | Yeah, it was actually, it was funny. |
| 1:21.6 | It was like 10.30 at night. |
| 1:23.4 | And it's basically just like this note out of nowhere, I do accept the request because I didn't |
| 1:28.9 | know who it was. And it was like, hey, Mike, just FYI, I've been scraping the, you know, |
| 1:35.2 | open playlist data from a number of public figures for about a year now and created a website |
| 1:42.0 | just to kind of show off how much of people's listening habits are public. |
| 1:47.1 | Oh, by the way, you're on it too. |
| 1:48.8 | Take a look. |
... |
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