Last month, at around 10:30 on a Tuesday evening, I got an encrypted text message from someone calling himself “Tim.” It felt cloak and dagger — he sent me a link to a website that contained data compiled from public figures, airing their personal information.
It was far from the next Watergate. The site showed the Spotify listening habits of about 50 people — politicians, tech executives, journalists — scraped from information that they seemed to be unaware was public. To gild the lily, he called it the Panama Playlists, a riff on the decidedly more consequential Panama Papers leak of years past.
It was clever and, honestly, a bit funny. It showed that Vice President JD Vance listens to Justin Bieber and the Backstreet Boys — while making dinner, if the playlist’s title is any indication — and that the beloved weatherman Al Roker is really into Elton John (he appears to have played the track “Philadelphia Freedom” 151 times last year).
It got a little less funny, though, when I scrolled down and found myself, along with my colleague Kashmir Hill, on the list. If two reporters who write about technology and privacy for a living were sharing personal information without realizing it, how many others were doing the same?
Kashmir and I decided to get to the bottom of it. (You can read our story here.) In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what we found.
Public figures, public playlists
The true identity of “Tim” is Riley Walz, a 23-year-old engineer who has a history of digging around for open sources of data and spinning them into public projects. The idea for this one, he told me, was not to make “some grand political statement,” but to call attention to how much of our information is sitting out there, available to anyone with the time and interest to surface it.
