What amazes me is that all of this information came voluntarily <i>from Whisper</i>.<p>><i>The Guardian visited the Whisper offices to consider the possibility of undertaking other journalistic projects with the company and sent two reporters last month to look in detail at how the app operates. At no stage during the visit were the journalists told they could not report on the information shared with them.</i><p>What kind of a company invites journalists from a newspaper known for its investigative/muckraking skills, and then hands over their secret sauce along with such gems:<p>><i>Separately, Whisper has been following a user claiming to be a sex-obsessed lobbyist in Washington DC. The company’s tracking tools allow staff to monitor which areas of the capital the lobbyist visits. “He’s a guy that we’ll track for the rest of his life and he’ll have no idea we’ll be watching him,” the same Whisper executive said.</i><p>><i>The Guardian is no longer pursuing a relationship with Whisper.</i><p>Well, no shit Sherlock!
> The Guardian witnessed this practice on a three-day visit to the company’s Los Angeles headquarters last month, as part of a trip to explore the possibility of an expanded journalistic relationship with Whisper.<p>So they look to partner, don't like what they see and turn it into a story? Whisper has two problems: violating its users' trust, and letting an external group in without an agreement in place. The Guardian also looks bad flipping this into a lede in my mind.
So even if you disable the location feature it still tracks your location? I'd be interested what they mean by 'broad location tracking' but I can't imagine that it's consistent with their anonymity claims. e.g. see <a href="http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/full/srep01376.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/full/srep01...</a>
Aren't Open Source privacy apps more preferable? Shouldn't we all be talking about ChatSecure, Redphone, Textsecure, Mailvelope, Cryptocat, GPG, EnigMail, etc.? And about the companies that offer these programs as a service?<p>While it's not a guarantee of privacy, open source does significantly increase the likelihood that invasions of privacy and security vulnerabilities can be discovered by enthusiasts and journalists. Right? Wouldn't that be preferable when selecting a privacy app?
I'm the CTO of Whisper. This is really bad reporting. A few notes:<p>1. we use a legacy maxmind geoip database so we can put the whisper in a general location. that is so inaccurate as to be laughable. for instance, my current IP using our service says "USA", though I'm in Venice, CA. This is hardly a privacy violation, and it's really important for a bunch of reasons:<p>a) The whisper needs to actually appear in the app, and it won't appear without some general location. The % of all Whispers which are tagged as somewhere in the middle of Kansas because we don't really know where they are (but we know they are in the US) is very high. This is not a scandal.<p>b) We want to know where a user is in a general sense for things like tracking timezone so when we send pushes we know not to send pushes at 3 in the morning. you'd be surprised how often device timezone may not always match with physical location.<p>c) We use general location to determine things users may be interested in. folks who post in lower manhattan may see different results than people in College Station, TX, over time.<p>d) We have a lot of anti-spam technology, and what IP you posted from, and what country that IP is in, is important. I can't elaborate on this but it's incredibly logical why we would use that information for things like keeping the app from filling with spammy garbage.<p>e) We throw away the IP you used to create the whisper after a brief period of time.<p>2. We've been working with researchers at a local university to ensure the anonymity around location was such that they couldn't determine groups of whispers from the same user. They contributed to our randomization algorithms and provided suggestions around security.<p>3. We fuzz location even more than this on write and on reads. We randomize it based on the observer who asks for the location, and we randomize it BEFORE WE SAVE IT TO OUR DATABASE. In other words, we don't actually know where the user was once the whisper is saved, and we can't even tell later.<p>4. The guardian's reporting that we changed our terms of service in response to the article is beyond silly. I am happy to show a screenshot of the email chain between myself and our lawyers back in July. The entire point of updating the TOS was to make it clearer and easier to read, not to protect ourselves or give ourselves more rights to user data. It takes MONTHS to get things like TOS write for an app like Whisper, and we take it seriously.<p>5. Edited to add... We just don't have any personally identifiable information. Not name, email, phone number, etc. I can't tell you who a user is without them posting their actual personal information, and in that case, it would be a violation of our terms of service.
Anonymous - no way. A small amount of location tracking + the additional data any agency and many others can easily access will easily identify an individual. I read the UCSB paper referenced by the Whisper CTO - it just said there was a hard problem Whisper was trying to do something about. The paper also said that each user had a permanent GUID. So if I, with my GUID, get on a plane from SFO to (say) Santa Fe on one particular day - the GUID use moving will make it clear I have taken a plane - then the agency (or perhaps my credit card issuer?) will get the candidates for my GUID down to a few hundred at most just from that move and the passenger list (or ticket purchase records). Coupled with my GUID's home city and work city and they probably have me nailed - just like that. Trivial.
I've always suspected that the standard rationalizations about modern user tracking (not <i>technically</i> PII or assuming your data won't be analyzed outside the aggregate) were feel good nothings. At least I have something concrete to point to now when I say it's all bullshit.
All I have to say is, Thank you Guardian!!!<p>And, oh, screw this app.<p>I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Or any other <i>claimed</i> secure/anonymous app, that does not have the "Moxie Marlinspike seal of approval"(TM)!
I'm not upset or surprised by this. However, it's not the tracking Whisper and similar apps do that upsets me; it's the trashy content and vituperative gossip produced by their users.
The central business model of our tech times is converting data into money. The eternal pressure will be to gather more and more data over time since that will result in more money.