Whisper, the app that lets you post whatever you want under the guise of anonymity, says that a recent Guardian piece, which accuses them of various privacy violations, is a pack of “vicious lies.” The British newspaper recently claimed to have inside information that despite the premise of the app, they were tracking user information and even going as far as giving out details to various government agencies. Officials from the app immediately refuted these accusations and will give out further statements to prove their innocence.
According to the article in The Guardian, the app’s servers know where users are posting from, even if they opt-out of the location tracking feature. They use the longitude and latitude of your phone to see where you are. It sends posts and information to agencies like the Department of Defense, MI5 and the FBI, when the posts are coming out of military bases. This has probably something to do with protecting sensitive information from getting out and affecting secret operations. While this may be necessary depending on the situation, privacy experts from the newspaper say that the app’s terms of service uses a “lower legal threshold.”
But an executive from Whisper, Neetzan Zimmerman says that the article is “lousy with falsehoods” and that they are simply trying to “scare away” people from using the service. They will be “debunking” all the claims in the piece soon. The Guardian and Whisper have worked together before to look for people who were interesting enough for “article fodder.” The newspaper admits they were trying to explore a potential partnership with the app, so this might be also a case of a relationship gone sour.
Recent online security breaches and privacy violation accusations have only reinforced the idea that nothing you post online will ever be truly private. But if these claims from The Guardian are true, then people posting on the app will probably not see the point of using it anymore since all they really want is to be able to post their secrets without fear of discovery. Of course Whisper would never admit to such a thing, so this will probably be end up a case of “they said, they said.”
