14 DAY TRIAL // Whisper, the service touted as a safe place for people to anonymously share personal thoughts, is actually monitoring messages and tracking the location of some of its clients, even if geolocation is turned off, and provides the information to the US Department of Defense (US DoD).
The service can be used from the mobile app, available for iOS and Android, and it attracted millions of users posting about 2.6 million messages every day. It is two years old and the current valuation of the company is $200 / €156.3 million.
Suicide whispers from military locations shared with multiple organizations
According to an investigation by The Guardian, data from Whisper users is added to a searchable database that persists for an indefinite period of time.
The newspaper also reveales that the company cooperates with the US DoD for a multi-year study touching on the frequency of suicide and self-harm mentions from devices known to be used inside US military bases and compounds, without disclosing this detail to the users.
In a lengthy response to the allegations made by The Guardian, Whisper also addressed the suicide study issue. The company did not deny that it was actively tracking such messages and informed that the US DoD was not the only organization receiving this sort of data.
“We’re proudly working with many organizations to lower suicide rates and the US military is among them,” it is stated in the reply.
“We are not sharing specific user data with any organization. We noticed how frequently suicide is mentioned among those living on US military bases or compounds and reached out to organizations to see how we could work together to address this important issue,” Whisper added.
General tracking is used for improving the service
Whisper CTO Chad DePue denied the location tracking allegations in a post on Hacker News, saying that, while the company does collect such data, it is non-specific and cannot be used to connect a user to a location.
“We use general location to determine things users may be interested in,” he said, adding that knowing the IP address helps filter out spam and that this information is discarded after a while; the IP would provide details such as city, state or country.
By general location, the CTO refers to the fact that although the company has the means to pinpoint a user on the map, it applies a procedure to obscure the location of the user within 500 meters of the actual spot; this is used even for users who enable the app’s geolocation services.
Furthermore, knowing the general whereabouts of a user is necessary for sending pushes according to their timezone, as well as for showing messages from people in the same region, a feature taken into consideration for the future development of the service.