Whisper, formerly known as WhisperText, is an application that launched in March 2012, claiming to be “the first completely anonymous social media network.” The features of the app include the capability to post anonymous messages or “whispers” in the form of text overlaid on a picture.
Users have the option to respond to an anonymous post publicly or to private pseudonymous chats, but don’t have a public identity in the app. Developers claimed this would counter cyberbullying and the usual self-promotion found on Facebook since users had the opportunity to over share without repercussion.
In October 2014, The Guardian planned to write a story about Whisper’s internal practices that breached the agreement made with its users, specifically in terms to privacy.
Prior to the Guardian’s allegations, Whisper explicitly stated their commitment “to protecting [a user’s] privacy and the security of personally identifying information.” The ethical implications of these terms and conditions for Whisper are to act in a way that upholds the anonymity of their users. The references below illustrate just a couple of their underhanded tactics and the safeguards they put in place to address these issues:
- Every post is retained in a central database and users who expressly opted out of geolocation are tracked via IP data
- Previous terms of service said a user’s “permission to our access to and tracking of your location based information is purely voluntary.” Terms now tell users to bear in mind that even if location services are disabled, Whisper “may still determine your city, state, and country location based on your IP address.”
- User information and posts that pose are shared with the Department of Defense, FBI, and M15
- Whisper’s new terms of service state they “may monitor User Content…[and] take proactive steps, including without limitation notification to appropriate authorities…[users] hereby expressly acknowledge and agree to such monitoring and that [they] may disclose information and data that might lead to your identification if, at [their] sole discretion, deem it appropriate to protect you or others from serious harm.”
Even with the detailed instructions in place for law enforcement agencies to obtain user data, I still question Whisper's legal threshold for providing private information. Whisper claims the measures taken to protect their users’ identities are “extremely secure,” but if The Guardian found these loopholes, how could they possibly expect their users to trust them on the promise of anonymity when they blatantly disregard their sole interest in using the site?
Hey Tiffani,
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of Whisper before so after reading your post, my opinion may seem rather unfavorable. I find it interesting that Whisper said it was voluntary for users to allow their location to be tracked but how the service would pretty much uncover the data anyway based on the IP address.
How can users move forward and trust a service that has been dishonest? Personally, I am very skeptical. As they stated, they have the ability to see user IP address. That's just the beginning to other things they can track and learn about their users that really disregards the user's purpose of participating. So, it is not really voluntary at all. If you want to use the service, you will be tracked and have data collected.
Megan, you and I share very similar sentiments about Whisper. I can't imagine users being pleased about learning that what they believed to be "anonymity" was completely taken for granted. The thing that burns me the most is that the company didn't even try to apologize to their users, or give them the option to opt out of the network... they simply re-wrote their terms of service to make their actions permissible. And like most of the other platforms we read about, they could do so without notification to their users. Since most don't read the T's and C's to begin with, users could very well be entirely unaware of the implications while using the site.
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