Whisper is investigating the issue, although it claims that the accusations are all false to begin with

Oct 27, 2014 15:59 GMT  ·  By

Whisper has put some employees, members of the editorial team, on suspension as the company investigates some troubling facts that were recently reported.

As you may know, The Guardian reported not too long ago that Whisper wasn’t as anonymous as it wanted to appear and that it tracked certain “newsworthy” users even if they opted out of the location feature, by using their IP address. This is a worrisome accusation for the app and one that it has so far denied.

Whisper has accused The Guardian of lying, adding that the newspaper has made a mistake by posting the story, and that they will regret it. The company’s Neetzan Zimmerman, former Gawker writer, who manages the editorial team, says that the person that supposedly spooked out The Guardian’s reporters doesn’t exist in the department.

The Whisper CEO, Michael Heyward, has decided to suspend the editorial team and expressed concern about the situation, launching an investigation. Even so, he’s made it clear that the Guardian’s report was mistaken about a number of factors because it made some technology-related inferences based on discussions with non-technical people.

Heyward claims that the editorial team did not track users who had opted out of sharing their location with the app. “The Whispers referred to here contain location information the users had publicly shared, because the user either opted in to sharing their location, mentioned their location in the Whisper, or tagged their location.”

CEO: No IP tracking

The CEO told Gigaom that there’s no IP location backtracking of users. He claims that this is confusing the practices of the safety team with the editorial team. What he means is that when the company receives a valid legal request from the authorities, or when they learn of an imminent and serious threat to people’s safety by the contents of a Whisper, the safety team will indeed forward the IP address, if they have it, to the legal authorities.

“We do not track users passively or actively. We have a history of a user’s Whispers, which are public. If they shared their location, it is randomized to within 500m and publicly displayed on their posts. We promote and feature Whispers, and our editorial team looks at past Whispers from a user to determine their authenticity,” Heyward added to clarify how the system works.

While the company does store location data, it doesn’t know who the users are. This is a feature created for users to be able to search for old Whispers shared at a certain location.

Whisper has been asked to appear before the Senate committee run by Senator Jay Rockefeller, to clarify the situation. One of the issues they want to clear things up on is the fact that the company said that users cannot be tracked, but then admitted to collecting data on them. If the other accusations have yet to be proven, this one bit is clear as day and could get the company in trouble.