The Great Celebrity Spotify Playlist Hack
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 28 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 | About a month ago, Mike Isaac, a tech reporter at the New York Times, received a strange |
| 0:10.9 | message on his phone. |
| 0:12.8 | Yeah, it was actually, it was funny. |
| 0:13.9 | It was like 10.30 at night. |
| 0:15.7 | And it's basically just like this note out of nowhere, I'd do accept the request because I didn't know who it was. |
| 0:21.8 | And it was like, hey, Mike, just FYI, I've been scraping the, you know, open playlist data from a number of public figures for about a year now. |
| 0:32.5 | And created a website just to kind of show off how much of people's listening habits are public. |
| 0:39.3 | Oh, by the way, you're on it too. Take a look. |
| 0:42.4 | The website was called the Panama Playlists, a riff on the infamous Panama Papers, |
| 0:47.5 | a massive leak that exposed millions of financial records from big spenders using an offshore |
| 0:53.3 | law firm. |
| 0:54.8 | Some big names were in the Panama playlist, but it was much lower stakes. |
| 0:59.5 | It was like the type of music that J.D. Vance would listen to, or someone supposedly with |
| 1:08.9 | the name J.D. Vance and the playlist J J.D. Vance, would listen to under a |
| 1:12.6 | playlist called Making Dinner, right? And so it would be like the Backstreet Boys, I Want It That Way, |
| 1:18.6 | or a Justin Bieber song, you know, things where, sure, I've listened to these songs, but it might not be the ones |
| 1:27.2 | I'm, like, tweeting out for all my friends in the public to see. |
| 1:35.9 | According to the Panama playlist, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is a fan of Nellie's Hoten here. |
| 1:42.8 | OpenAI's Sam Altman has a playlist of tracks he's shazammed, |
| 1:47.3 | one that includes Missy Elliott's iconic Get Your Freak on. |
| 1:51.4 | Dozens of high-profile public officials and tech executives |
| 1:54.8 | appeared to have their Spotify playlist exposed in the leak. |
... |
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