Revealed: how Whisper app tracks ‘anonymous’ users
Found on The Guardian on Saturday, 18 October 2014
The company behind Whisper, the social media app that promises users anonymity and claims to be “the safest place on the internet”, is tracking the location of its users, including some who have specifically asked not to be followed.
But on Monday – four days after learning the Guardian intended to publish this story – Whisper rewrote its terms of service; they now explicitly permit the company to establish the broad location of people who have disabled the app’s geolocation feature.
User data, including Whisper postings that users believe they have deleted, is collated in a searchable database.
Whisper has an offshore base in the Philippines, where more than 100 employees screen messages 24 hours a day.
So much for that project. If you use it, delete it. There's not even end to end encryption of your messages. It's more a threat to your privacy, than a tool to protect it.