Last month, an anonymous prankster spun up a website revealing the purported Spotify listening habits of about 50 people, including politicians, tech executives and journalists. The person, who called himself “Tim,” compiled the list from Spotify profiles that the subjects seemed to be unaware were public. Tim gave the site a winking title: The Panama Playlists.
Tim clearly had a sense of humor. The title is a riff on a far more consequential document dump detailing offshore banking activity some years ago. Tim also seemed inspired by a touch of sadism. To his victims, the Panama Playlists popped up unexpectedly, like a Spotify Wrapped compilation from hell.
A playlist purportedly belonging to Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, revealed that he had to use the Shazam app to identify Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” — a mainstay of any millennial hip-hop collection. (That playlist has since been taken down.) An account apparently belonging to Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, maintained a party playlist featuring an on-the-nose song called “Billionaire.” Jacob Helberg, founder of the Hill and Valley Forum, a political group, listens to just as much Charli XCX and Chappell Roan as the rest of us.
The playlist also included the music habits of two New York Times reporters, Mike Isaac and Kashmir Hill. That is, the authors of this article.
Tim had figured out that Mike obsessively listened to “Huggin and Kissin,” a song by the band Big Black Delta — 139 times over the past year. And because of Tim’s digging, the internet now knows that Kashmir’s “writing music” includes Mogwai and Aphex Twin. (She doesn’t mind sharing her focus hack, and has left the list public for other writers to try. But she wasn’t happy to discover that playlists titled with her daughters’ names were public; those are now private.)
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The post We Are Tech Privacy Reporters. Our Music Habits Got Doxxed. appeared first on New York Times.
