Revealed: how Whisper app tracks ‘anonymous’ users
Revealed: how Whisper app tracks ‘anonymous’ users
Some Whisper users monitored even after opting out of
geolocation services
Company shares some information with US Department of
Defense
User data collated and indefinitely stored in searchable
database
Whisper app tracks ‘secret’ users
Whisper app rewrites terms of service and privacy policy
How the ‘safest place on the internet’ tracks its users
Whisper: the facts
A Whisper user posted this message from the vicinity of
the White House. The red icons signify someone who has posted a Whisper.
Potentially identifying information has been redacted by the Guardian.
Photograph: Guardian
Paul Lewis and Dominic Rushe
Thursday 16 October 2014 11.35 EDT
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.
The practice of monitoring the whereabouts of Whisper
users – including those who have expressly opted out of geolocation services –
will alarm users, who are encouraged to disclose intimate details about their
private and professional lives.
Whisper is also sharing information with the US
Department of Defense gleaned from smartphones it knows are used from military
bases, and developing a version of its app to conform with Chinese censorship
laws.
The US version of the app, which enables users to publish
short messages superimposed over photographs or other images, has attracted
millions of users, and is proving especially popular among military personnel
who are using the service to make confessions they would be unlikely to publish
on Facebook or Twitter.
Currently, users of Whisper are publishing as many as
2.6m messages a day. Facebook is reportedly developing its own Whisper-style
app for anonymous publishing. The trend toward anonymity in social media has
some privacy experts concerned about security.
Approached for comment last week, Whisper said it “does
not follow or track users”. The company added that the suggestion it was
monitoring people without their consent, in an apparent breach of its own terms
of service, was “not true” and “false”.
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.
Whisper has developed an in-house mapping tool that
allows its staff to filter and search GPS data, pinpointing messages to within
500 meters of where they were sent.
The technology, for example, enables the company to
monitor all the geolocated messages sent from the Pentagon and National
Security Agency. It also allows Whisper to track an individual user’s movements
over time.
When users have turned off their geolocation services,
the company also, on a targeted, case-by-case basis, extracts their rough
location from IP data emitted by their smartphone.
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.
After reviewing Whisper’s back-end tools and speaking
extensively with the company’s executives, the Guardian has also established
that:
User data, including Whisper postings that users believe
they have deleted, is collated in a searchable database. The company has no
access to users’ names or phone numbers, but is storing information about the
precise time and approximate location of all previous messages posted through
the app. The data, which stretches back to the app’s launch in 2012, is being
stored indefinitely, a practice seemingly at odds with Whisper’s stated policy
of holding the data only for “a brief period of time”.
A team headed by Whisper’s editor-in-chief, Neetzan
Zimmerman, is closely monitoring users it believes are potentially newsworthy,
delving into the history of their activity on the app and tracking their
movements through the mapping tool. Among the many users currently being
targeted are military personnel and individuals claiming to work at Yahoo,
Disney and on Capitol Hill.
Whisper’s policy toward sharing user data with law
enforcement has prompted it on occasions to provide information to both the FBI
and MI5. Both cases involved potentially imminent threats to life, Whisper
said, a practice standard in the tech industry. But privacy experts who
reviewed Whisper’s terms of service for the Guardian said the company appeared
to require a lower legal threshold for providing user information to
authorities than other tech companies.
The company is cooperating with the US Department of
Defense, sharing information with researchers investigating the frequency of
mentions of suicide or self-harm from smartphones that Whisper knows are being
used from US military bases. Whisper stressed that “specific user data” is not
being shared with the DoD, adding that the company was “proudly working with
many organisations to lower suicide rates and the US military is among them”.
Whisper is developing a Chinese version of its app, which
received a soft-launch earlier this month. Companies like Google, Facebook and
Twitter are banned in mainland China. Whisper executives said they had agreed
to the demands China places on tech companies operating in its jurisdiction,
including a ban on the use of certain words.
Whisper’s targeted monitoring of some people who use the
app – even some of those who have declared they do not want to be followed by
opting out of geolocation – is likely to surprise its users, who are drawn to
the app by the bold promises the company makes about their anonymity.
“Whisper isn’t actually about concealing identity. It’s
about a complete absence of identity,” the company’s co-founder and CEO,
Michael Heyward, recently told Entrepreneur magazine. “The concept around
Whisper is removing the concept of identity altogether, so you’re not as
guarded.”
He has called Whisper the “safest place on internet” and
portrays the app as a secure place in which users should feel free to express
their innermost feelings and confessions.
Whisper, which was recently valued at over $200m, has
grown rapidly since its launch two years ago. It is among the fleet of
confessional apps, such as Secret and Yik Yak, which backers say enable users
to be more candid than they are on other social media platforms.
To stamp out inappropriate behaviour, Whisper has an
offshore base in the Philippines, where more than 100 employees screen messages
24 hours a day. Whisper described the process as “extremely secure”.
In an attempt to promote content posted on the app,
Whisper has worked hard to build relationships with news organisations. Its
longest-standing partnership is with Buzzfeed, and Whisper’s executives said
they are now in discussions with newspapers and TV networks.
On Thursday, a Buzzfeed spokesperson said the news outlet
is now halting its partnership with Whisper. “We’re taking a break from our
partnership until Whisper clarifies to us and its users the policy on user
location and privacy,” a spokesperson said.
Over the last year, Whisper has promoted revelations
posted by anonymous users about the dismissal of Dov Charney, the founder of
American Apparel, and accusations about Gwyneth Paltrow’s private life.
In September, Whisper returned to the headlines when an
apparently suicidal man in Texas used the app to broadcast messages and
photographs from the middle of a standoff with armed police.
Whisper’s in-house mapping tool identifies users who have
posted in the vicinity of the National Security Agency, Maryland, using their
GPS data. Occasionally, the company uses IP address location data to establish
the rough location of some users who have opted out the app’s geolocation
services. Photograph: Guardian
The Guardian had previously worked with Whisper to find
Iraq war veterans who wanted to share their opinions of Isis, find an
undocumented immigrant to write an opinion article and post people’s
confessions about Valentine’s Day. At no point during those collaborations did
Whisper indicate it was ascertaining the location of individual users who had
disabled their geolocation feature.
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.
The Guardian is no longer pursuing a relationship with
Whisper.
Whisper introduced its optional geolocation feature
earlier this year, enabling users to view other people’s messages that have
been posted by users within a set-mile radius, known as the “nearby” function.
Crucially, the app also contains a button that allows users to opt out of its
geolocation service, a facility its terms state is “purely voluntarily”.
That system provided Whisper with a hoard of easily
analysed location data from those who opted into the service, and the company
has become increasingly open with journalists that its in-house technology
allows it to locate users. The company now uses geolocation to make judgments
about the “veracity” of users posting on the site.
In July, during the recent Israeli war in Gaza, Whisper
was able to monitor Israeli Defense Force soldiers on the frontline. “We had 13
or 14 soldiers who we were tracking – every whisper they did,” one Whisper
executive said during the Guardian’s visit.
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.
Now the company plans to make its database and a version
of its mapping tool available to select journalists in the coming months.
When Guardian reporters visited Whisper last month,
Zimmerman and another executive said that when they wanted to establish the
location of individual users who are among the 20% who have opted out of
geolocation services, they simply asked their technical staff to obtain the
“latitude and longitude” of the phones they had used.
One of the users that Whisper suggested the Guardian
could be interested in researching, for example, claimed to be soldier who
could be imminently deployed to Iraq.
The user had apparently turned off their geolocation
facility, denying the company permission to track them. Yet Whisper was able to
ascertain the dates the user had been in Afghanistan and Fort Riley, Kansas.
Whisper later explained that when it wants to establish
the location of users who have disabled their geolocation services, the company
uses their IP location.
On Thursday last week, the Guardian contacted Whisper,
explained it planned to write a story about the company’s internal practices
and asked for comment.
Whisper acknowledged that it researches the location of
specific users it believes are posting newsworthy information, but emphasised
it typically uses GPS data.
Whisper stressed the IP location data it uses for people
who have asked not to be followed is rough and unreliable.
“We occasionally look at user IP addresses internally to
determine very approximate location,” the company said. “User IP addresses may
allow very coarse location to be determined to the city, state or country
level.”
It added: “Whisper does not request or store any
personally identifiable information from users, therefore there is never a
breach of anonymity. From time to time, when a user makes a claim of a
newsworthy nature, we review the user’s past activity to help determine
veracity.”
The company strongly rejected any assertion of
wrongdoing. “The Guardian’s assumptions that Whisper is gathering information
about users and violating user’s privacy are false,” it said. “The privacy of
our users is not violated in any of the circumstances suggested in the Guardian
story.”
Four days later, Whisper rewrote large sections of its
terms of service and introduced an entirely new privacy policy.
Whereas the previous terms and conditions described all
of Whisper’s tracking of user location as “voluntary”, the new terms now warn
users to “bear in mind that, even if you have disabled location services, we
may still determine your city, state, and country location”.
Since becoming aware that the Guardian planned to publish
its story, the anonymous app has also inserted a new line into its privacy
policy.
It now warns users that turning on the app’s geolocation
feature may “allow others, over time, to make a determination as to your
identity”.
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