She was in the car listening to either Christmas music or Taylor Swift (she couldn’t recall which), when there was an interruption. “I assumed it was like some sad teenager going through a breakup, listening to bad music,” said Charlene Coughlin of her hacker.Ĭoughlin, 36 and an advertising executive in Cleveland, was hacked last Saturday.
When a Spotify account gets hacked, the hackee is able to see the music the hacker has chosen (either on the hacker’s device, or sometimes, presumably by accident, on the hackee’s). That seems to be less true when it comes to music. Usually, one doesn’t think about one’s hacker too often. (Spotify said in a statement that it takes “all fraudulent activity on our service extremely seriously” and recommended that its users protect themselves by refraining from using the same user names and passwords across various accounts.) These digital incursions can be unsettling (when not outright upsetting), but they’re often impersonal. Weeks later, he has not yet changed his password, he said, because of “laziness.” So he has continued to endure his hackers’ strange taste.Īsked how he pictured the person choosing the songs, he said, “I’m imagining a 70-year-old bald man in a rocking chair.”Īccounts get compromised. The music was playing on Google Chrome, a web browser that Ball does not use. He soon realized that he had been hacked. “It was atmospheric, almost like massage music,” he said. The music was odd, like nothing he would choose to play for himself. (He couldn’t start it again he was still showering.) Then another song started playing. “That’s a shame,” Ball remembered thinking. The song he was listening to on Spotify, by American singer Lauv, had suddenly stopped. (Handout via The New York Times)Ĭonnor Ball, the 23-year-old bassist of British pop band the Vamps, was in the shower when he realized something was up. When a Spotify account gets hacked, the hackee is able to see the music the hacker has chosen and a portrait of the hacker often emerges.
In an undated handout image, a Spotify playlist made for a hacker.
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